The atrocities of Hell Is Us make me wonder if ‘real-world’ Soulslikes have a future

Bringing up the bodies

Image credit:Nacon

Content warning for discussion of mass killings, sexual assault and sectarian hatred.

Very early on in Hell Is Us, you come to a village that might as well be titled “War Crimes Theme Park”.

The approach takes you past an exposed mass grave, with mud-soaked bodies piled in the shadow of a digger’s bucket. A man cradles his lifeless wife and daughter nearby. Down the path, there’s a moonlit stretch of swampland full of battered, sunken tanks and dead soldiers. The village occupies a rise in the distance. It’s been occupied and looted by a force of Sabinians, one of two groups locked in a bloody struggle with religious roots that, according to developers Rogue Factor, reimagines real-life civil wars from the 1990s .

I have a nice chat with the Sabinian captain - a grizzled and faintly cartoonish figure of obscenity, the kind of readily self-unpacking arsehole you’d expect from a game titled “Hell Is Us”. He calls the opposing Palomists “cockroaches” who need to be exterminated or sent to the camps, justifying his own atrocities with the remark that the Palomists have done this much and worse. To right of the captain’s lookout post, there’s a house where a woman describes being turned into a sex slave as punishment for joining a Palomist lynch mob (it wasn’t till I left that I realised the significance of the house being unlocked, in a game where doors tend to be bolted). To the left of the entrance, off-duty firing squad members lounge before a line of recently executed civilians.

<img loading=“lazy” src=“https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/1620730_398.jpg?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp" onerror=“this.onerror=null;this.src=‘https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7F7TRXHtjiKvHb5vS7DmnxvpHiDyoYyYvm1nHB3Qp2_w3BnM6A2eq4v7FYxCC9bfZt3a9vIMtAYEKUiaDQbHMg-ViyGmRIj39MLp0bGFfgfYw1Dc9q_H-T0wiTm3l0Uq42dETrN9eC8aGJ9_IORZsxST1AcLR7np1koOfcc7tnHa4S8Mwz_xD9d0=s16000';" alt=“A third-person view of a man in a black poncho looking at a painted historical mural on a brick wall in a ruined town, from the videogame Hell Is Us. The mural exhorts the viewer to “Never forget” about a notorious outbreak of sectarian violence. - 5”>

A Palomist abbot has been strung up at the far side of town: he laments “the spread of hatred from one generation to the next”, and is sorry to hear that “the outside world seems to fall prey to the same dark impulses as Hadeans”. He asks you to check on a relative of his, a girl hiding in the attic of a shelled house. Hunkered under her blanket by candlelight, she tearfully describes the Sabinians as “not people”, and muses on the fate of her family in heaven, “a place that has no memories”.

Who are you in amongst all this? A vagrant masquerading as an agent of the “Organised Nations” - a fictional parallel for a UN peacekeeper, with a similar blue Earth logo design, but your mission isn’t wholly Earthly.

Their outward political functions aside, the ON peacekeepers are investigating a plague of hollow-bodied monsters. Your slick cowled ON poncho grants you license to visit every region of the war, and involve yourself with everything, though the Sabinian captain makes it clear that he’d shoot you if he could get away with it. You are something akin to the protagonist of a FromSoftware game: a returning exile, at once privileged and ostracised, regarded with loathing and suspicion yet equipped with the power - perhaps, the only power - to intervene in an undead world of self-mobilising violence.

Hell Is Us is fairly redolent of From’s work. The melee combat is built around stamina and parries, with a timed health regain system similar to Nioh ’s pulsing and Bloodborne ’s rallying. The game doesn’t have bonfire mechanics, just holographic, floating manual savepoints that leave slain enemies in place, but it takes some inspiration from the overarching Souls template of a purgatorial landscape in which nothing truly dies.

Image credit:Nacon

Enemies respawn when you travel away from an area; the only way to shut them down for good is to enter and dispel one of the rippling black domes that house the fossilised trauma of the land’s human residents. The monsters are, in other words, rogue manifestations of the country’s historical injuries. An early dungeon threads their supernatural origins into the ‘real world’ context: it takes you through an ancient theocratic black site, where graven stone plaques explain the proper incarceration and processing of ‘sinners’, then emerges into a recently dug trench network lined by rusting howitzers. The symbols of that dungeon are everywhere in the open world, on murals in towns, on outfits, on the three-part puzzles that might otherwise strike you as casual borrowings from Zelda.

I’m only a few hours into Hell Is Us, and I’m somewhat repelled by its showy nihilism and mystical ideas about historical cycles. Again, it feels cartoonish and didactic. There’s wearing your heart on your sleeve and then there’s summarising your whole emotional arc in the title. It perhaps doesn’t help that you’re playing a character performed by Elias “Adam Jensen” Toufexis, his voice all haunted surface and toneless gravitas, the perfect fit for a blockbuster videogame with A Message to deliver. The depiction of that village often feels like atrocity porn, exploitation theatre.

I am, however, interested in the premise of a Soulslike set in something like our historical present, inasmuch as I can’t quite believe it hasn’t been attempted more often. It makes me wonder anew about the utility of the Soulslike genre as a historical critical instrument, appropriate to an era of “forever wars”.

The decades-old Israeli siege, occupation and latter-day invasion of Gaza need no introduction here. The Somali Civil War has been fought since the 1980s. I remember the huge protests on UK streets against the most recent, US-led western invasion of Iraq in 2003; that war and subsequent occupation theoretically ended in 2011, but it arguably continues today in callously framed “low intensity” form, with a diminished western troop presence amid secular “conflict”, insurgencies and militias acting on behalf of neighbouring countries.

Image credit:Nacon

FromSoftware’s games harken back approximately to medieval times, but their tales and systemising of petrified hatred and endless decline, of cataclysmic feuding and superannuated rulers who refuse to yield power, seem just as available to comparison with the above. As I play Hell Is Us (I can’t guarantee I’ll have time to fully review it), I’m thinking about how Soulsy mechanics and systems such as bonfires, reclaimable XP, particular kinds of status effect and the running order of new weapons and bosses could be used to explore something as terrible and complex as the war in Somalia.

Probably, this is an absolutely dreadful idea. Based on the few hours I’ve played, Hell Is Us certainly suggests how it could be done badly. Soulslikes deal in marvelous grotesques, and I’m not sure it’s helpful to apply such thinking to real-life dehumanisation and slaughter. But I do have to acknowledge Rogue Factor for going where not even From have quite dared.

Hell is Us

Xbox Series X/S

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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