The Maw - 19th-24th February 2024

This week’s new PC game releases and our weekly newsblog

Image credit:Pierre Denys de Montfort/Wikimedia Commons

Another week of PC game releases is upon us and oh heck, slow down. There are an alarming number of games out this week that I want to play, from large-scale 3D productions to itty-bitty time-killers, each sinisterly appropriate to my Steam stats and wider research interests. Are videogame publishers and The Maw in cahoots to overwhelm me with impulse-buys and sabotage my attempts to Report the News? It’s possible. It’s possible. The Maw can be pretty cunning for an indiscriminate force of cosmic famine. The creature has been known to forge alliances with misguided mortals, seeking to flank and overwhelm harried news writers. How else to explain Phil Spencer’s T-shirts?

But let’s not worry about that for the moment. Without further ado, here’s a list of PC games out this week that I , for one, consider worthy of a click, if not necessarily a purchase: low-poly vertical shmup Dark Gravity (19th Feb); floral/insectile bullet hell Nidus (19th Feb); dieselpunk Advance Wars homage Empires Shall Fall (19th Feb); roguelike not-Poker Balatro (20th Feb); faerie survival sim Nightingale (20th Feb, early access); biopunk side-scroller Slave Zero X (21st Feb); Skynet-era RTS Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance (21st Feb); build-optimising action-RPG Last Epoch (21st Feb); post-apocalyptic car-whisperer Pacific Drive (22nd Feb); hellish feud ‘em up Solium Infernum (22nd Feb); primordial horror management sim The Tribe Must Survive (22nd Feb); claustrophobic desktop shmup Windowkill (23rd Feb).

As ever, let us know if I’ve missed anything obvious, like a new Half-Life game or something. Also as ever, you can follow our efforts to sift good news stories from the currents of the interweb in our weekly liveblog below.

Our live coverage of this event has finished.

• 09:08 am 02/23/2024 FRIDAY AT LAST
• 09:19 am 02/22/2024 THURSDAY BECKONS
• 10:00 am 02/21/2024 HERE BE WEDNESDAY
• 09:01 am 02/20/2024 TUESDAY DAWNS
• 09:25 am 02/19/2024 IT IS MONDAY

IT IS MONDAY

Set up a cordon around the emergence site! Salt the entrances and exfoliate the wallpaper! FEED THE MAW.

Via PCGamesN , the Satisfactory devs still have “a huge backlog of ideas”, even as their long-in-early-access factory sim rumbles towards 1.0 release.

Arrowhead are currently capping Helldivers 2’s concurrent players at 450,000 players to stop the servers exploding, as reported by PCG .

ZA/UM have formally acknowledged layoffs and a project cancellation reported last week by GHLF . “As with all studios, we adapt the size of our team to the work underway, growing when we start a new project and shrinking if one is cancelled,” a spokesperson told VG247 . “It is always hard to lose talented colleagues, and we thank those leaving for their many contributions to ZA/UM.”

A surprise gift from our tech team - we can now give posts titles without automatically bumping the liveblog to the top of the site (as we generally do when covering major events, such as game conferences). This means we can now do a little clickable “contents page” for days of the week up the top of the feed, there. Bless the techies!

Eleventh Hour Games have been detailing what they’re adding to budding Diablo-killer Last Epoch for this week’s 1.0 launch. The changelog is so massive they’ve broken it into chapters. Here’s part 1 , which covers a couple of new classes, and part 2 , in which there is much talk of new items and gear. Do the words “Spine of Malatros” mean anything to you?

PCG have dug up an Elden Ring mod that turns the whole game upside down. Different starting locations! New classes! One to occupy you while you wait for the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, perhaps.

Midday music: quite a downbeat choice, but I’ve been enjoying Metric’s Nothing Is Perfect .

Another one to add to the insane list of games coming out this week, but at least this one is a) free, and b) lasts a mere hour. It’s the very lovely, Please, Touch The Artwork 2 . Here are two of my favourite screenshots from it:

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Thomas Waterzooi

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Thomas Waterzooi

Former Halo designer Kevin Schmitt has been discussing rejected Halo pitches on Xitter.

We must have pitched 20-30 game ideas over the 12 years I was there that would have totally worked in the Halo universe. Many SP & MP ODST themed ones. Some galaxy-spanning, some more intimate…and one that was really dark. lol. — Kevin Schmitt (@kevindschmitt) February 18, 2024

I’ve been talking to Aaryn Flynn about the possibility of Nightingale’s Realm card system becoming a fully-fledged cardgame of some kind.

Writing these updates from a preview event in which I’m sitting next to possibly the largest quantity of Mini Cheddars I have seen in my life.

Fachewachewa says: Happy Balatro week everyone

And merry Balatro week to you as well!

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Playstack

Helldivers 2 has made its three “hardest” difficulties harder and its actual hardest mission easier in its latest patch , so you might be able to actually beat that Defend event now. The patch doesn’t address the ongoing buckling of its multiplayer servers under the game’s popularity, which led concurrent players to be capped over the weekend, so you might struggle to log in to begin with, mind.

That Crazy Taxi reboot will apparently be a “triple-A” game , according to the head of Sega’s Sapporo studio, who are working on the return of the arcade classic teased at the end of last year. But what does “triple-A” mean? An open-world multiplayer affair? Collectibles galore? Towers to climb in your cab? Your guess is as good as mine.

Huge Elden Ring mod The Convergence is basically a whole new game , with almost triple the number of playable classes (each with unique starting locations), dozens of new weapons, hundreds of extra spells, overhauled crafting and fast-travel systems, and more. The ideal way to pass time while you’re waiting for official expansion Shadow of the Erdtree to arrive!

Capcom have apologised for ’not meeting expectations’ with Street Fighter V , saying that their “self-reflection” on its messy launch - lambasted for a small roster of characters, thin single-player content and server issues - helped make this year’s Street Fighter 6 that much better.

TUESDAY DAWNS

Cry havoc, and let slip the blogs of war! FEED THE MAW.

Last night developer Sirrah messaged me about their story-driven colony builder Trappist , in which you control a movable base exploring a single solar system. I get an ever-so-gentle Outer Wilds vibe from it.

Via Eurogamer , there’s a Nintendo third party direct showcase happening tomorrow, 21st February at 2pm UK time and 6am PT. Given that it’s a third party dealio, it’s likely many of the Switch games shown will also be on PC.

According to PCGamer (specifically, freelance RPS contributor Rick Lane- hello Rick!) there’s an open world Terminator survival game set for full reveal at Nacon’s Connect event later this month. It’s set after Judgement Day, which is certainly a good timeframe for a survival experience. Will we get to infiltrate human enclaves as closet cyborgs? Here’s Nacon’s teaser trailer from a year back.

PCGamesN reports that Everywhere and Mindseye studio Build a Rocket Boy are laying people off. This is the studio founded by former GTA developer Leslie Benzies. Apparently, the publishing department, QA and art teams have gotten the worst of it.

A quote from Digital Eclipse editorial director Chris Kohler about restoring old games to our screens, taken from Khee Hoon Chan’s interview feature over at Techradar about game preservation: “The game actually doesn’t need to be fun because, if we’re setting the player’s expectations correctly, we’re not asking you to go in and play this and derive simple enjoyment from it; we’re putting this in as a museum exhibit to help you understand the path that a certain company took, or game designer might have taken to get to the final goal, or simply to show you something that’s historically fascinating.”

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader has received a major patch . According to Owlcat, it spans “over 1800 changes, including brand new voiceover and narrative content, QoL improvements, balance updates, numerous bug fixes and hundreds of fixes for optimization, performance and co-op stability.”

Here are the full 1.0 patch notes for action-RPG Last Epoch, which releases tomorrow 21st Feb. As detailed in the notes, the devs are taking the early access servers online for 24 hours later today to make the necessary changes.

As reported by The Scotsman , GTA devs Rockstar North have claimed over a third of a billion pounds in UK tax relief over the past decade.

Assassin’s Creed: Mirage has a new update that adds permadeath to the game.

Here’s a new trailer for Sand Land, Bandai Namco’s Dragon Ball-flavoured vehicular RPG.

People are still having a devil of a time finding a sessino in Helldivers 2. As reported by PCGamesN , Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt has said it’s not as simple as buying more servers. “We need to optimise the backend code,” he said. “We are hitting some real limits.”

The Loadout, meanwhile, speculate very plausibly that Arrowhead will one day add the first game’s high tech Illuminate faction to Helldivers 2.

Xbox have announced the next batch of games coming to Game Pass in late February - very pleased to see Indivisible on there, and Tales Of Arise and Boltgun!

More than 500 games on Steam generated over $3 million in gross revenue in 2023, according to Steam’s annual summary . That’s a lot of money, and a lot of games, if you were wondering.

Everywhere developer Build A Rocket Boy have now confirmed the studio is going through a round of layoffs, first reported yesterday, confirming “the removal of a number of roles globally” in a statement to Eurogamer .

“While we have made great progress developing our products, we are now in a position where we need to make changes to the way we work across our business in order to become a more agile studio and to meet the requirements that our projects demand,” said a spokesperson.

Build A Rocket Boy is the new studio from former GTA producer Leslie Benzies.

Balatro, the Poker roguelike Katharine awarded a Bestest Best in her review yesterday , is actually out now. You’ll find it on Steam .

Huh! Gigantic, the free-to-play team brawler which launched (fully) in 2017 and closed in 2018, is returning as Gigantic: Rampage Edition. It’s being published by Gearbox and developed by frequent co-development studio Abstraction. Original developers Motiga closed down with the game.

Rampage Edition won’t be free-to-play, but a “premium and definitive release” of the original, and it’s due on April 9th. Here’s a trailer:

A Gigantic: Rampage Edition trailer.Watch on YouTube

There’s a new seven-minute video breaking down the concepts behind Kemuri, the first game from Ikumi Nakamura’s studio Unseen. It talks setting, art and character but also gives glimpses of prototype parkour and grapple-hooking:

A developer diary delving into Kemuri.Watch on YouTube

People (the magazine and website) have a couple of photos of Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart in the coming Borderlands movie . Wild that this could be the nadir of Blanchett’s entire career at the same time as being the zenith of Hart’s.

Temtem: Swarm is a Vampire Survivors-like spin-off of the Pokémon-like Temtem, mixing topdown bullet heaven with character evolutions and three-player co-op. It’s aiming to release this year and there’s an announcement trailer now .

Here’s an expanded breakdown of what Gigantic: Rampage Edition is , and how it came to be.

Need For Speed: Unbound is getting a second year of live service updates , including a cops vs. racers mode “inspired by NFS: Hot Pursuit”.

Xbox have announced a second set of games coming to Game Pass in the second half of February . Popular JRPG Tales Of Arise arrives today, with Bluey: The Videogame, Indivisible, Space Engineers, and Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun all joining between now and March 5th.

The first trailer for #ELDENRING Shadow of the Erdtree will be revealed in 16 hours. Join us at 15:00 UTC. https://t.co/vdG8dJvcet pic.twitter.com/lBbKJYxW2z — ELDEN RING (@ELDENRING) February 20, 2024

HERE BE WEDNESDAY

Warp factor 4, engage! FEED THE MAW.

Bohemia Interactive have published their 2024 plans for DayZ, the massively influential survival game that entered early access way back in 2013. These plans include “a richer variety of wildlife, improving our terrain tools (Terrain Builder primarily) to make the lives of our modding community easier, and elevating survival mechanics — from extreme conditions to medical challenges — that will test your mettle and encourage players to adapt their survival strategies and manage their nutrition through an extended variety of sustenance options.” Keep on trucking, DayZ!

So, Elden Ring DLC time. Any hopes or speculations? Perhaps they will let us play as one of those giant living urns. Heck, I wouldn’t mind being an NPC in Elden Ring. It’s very peaceful when there are no players around.

Jeppe Carlsen has shared a clip of an early prototype for what would become Cocoon.

COCOON - first prototype (2017) vs final game (2023). In this video we compare a pipe puzzle where the pipe is used as a timer. https://t.co/AckMct5JjX pic.twitter.com/oMhFK5jU3y — Jeppe Carlsen (@CarlsenGames) February 20, 2024

Last night Graham popped a note about Seablip in our Trello. I’m going to crudely summarise it as Terraria Sea Of Thieves.

Neostream have shared their first real update on Little Devil Inside since 2021, plus a trailer, or rather, “a series of gameplay clips representative of what we have been working on in the UE5 engine”. It sounds like development has been a little messy, with the studio noting that certain people have left following conflicts over the game’s direction.

The first Monster Hunter Stories, the hack-and-craft series’ chirpy turn-based spin on Pokémon, will finally see a PC release in a new remaster . While its sequel came to PC, the uprezzed and expanded re-release will be the first time the original spin-off has escaped the Nintendo 3DS and phones since 2016.

Good news, masochists: Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree will have a fight that’s just as hard as Malenia , according to noted sadist Hidetaka Miyazaki - and a poison swamp too, for good measure.

Find room to squeeze one more nail into the coffin scrawled with “Hopes for Bloodborne on PC”, as FromSoftware have suggested that a hypothetical remake of the 2015 PlayStation 4 exclusive (which might then come to PC, who knows) might need to wait on another generation of console hardware first .

Prison Architect 2 has seen its development sentence extended by over a month, pushing its release date into May .

THURSDAY BECKONS

After a slightly rocky start, Inflexion Games have completed their server maintenance on Nightingale last night, so servers are now back up online. They also released a hotfix patch to address a ‘Running out of GPU memory’ error.

The studio behind February’s most played Steam Next Fest demo Dungeonborne have released some fun stats about what players got up to during the demo period - and it’s not good news for skeletons. 29 million of them were dispatched, but only just over 6000 players were able to beat the big Cyclops. You can see the full breakdown below.

Our team has been poring over your feedback and plotting out the path for future plan. Meanwhile, dive into some intriguing stats and standout moments from the Steam Next Fest demo! #Dungeonborne pic.twitter.com/jVmw6Zzudc — Dungeonborne (@Dungeonborne) February 18, 2024

There’s a new trailer for the lovely-looking The Plucky Squire in the wild, thanks to this week’s IGN FanFest. Very excited for this one.

In the more immediate release schedule, here are some more neat-looking games hitting Steam today :

• Regency Solitaire II
• Garden Life: A Cosy Simulator
• Pacific Drive
• Solium Infernum
• Sokobond Express
• Quadroids
• Sons Of The Forest (leaves early access)
• Inkulinati (leaves early access)

Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed was announced during yesterday’s Nintendo Partner Direct, and it’ll also bring Warren Spector’s cult classic 2010 platformer to PC for the first time .

Gorgeous action adventure Little Devil Inside has resurfaced with its first trailer and developer update in three years , with its creators pledging to finish what they’ve started. The project was originally funded via Kickstarter back in 2015.

Riot’s long in-development tag team fighting game Project L finally has a real name: 2XKO . Everyone hates it.

Millennia, Paradox’s take on the history-spanning 4X genre, will launch on March 26th . A new trailer also gives a glimpse of its Variant Ages, which can introduce alternate histories like alien invasions and steampunk technology.

Publisher Thunderful say that citybuilder SteamWorld Build underperformed various expectations, via their fiscal report and as covered by Game Developer . After several years of acquiring other studios, they’re also in the midst of layoffs and looking to sell subsdiary publisher Headup Games.

Epic’s swing at the MOBA genre, Paragon, was shut down in 2018, and many of its assets made available for others to use. One team eventually got permission to launch with official branding, leading to the 2022 Early Access release of Paragon: The Overprime. Today, it was announced that it too would shut down on April 22nd, 2024 . Another revival project using Paragon assets, Fault: Elder Orb , remains live in Early Access.

Sons Of The Forest 1.0 is out now and the full patch notes are live for those curious how the gribbly cannibal survival ’em up has changed.

The Forever Winter is a co-op survival shooter about fighting and looting “under the shadow of terrifying and gargantuan war machines locked in a never-ending conflict”, according to its Steam page . There’s also a cinematic trailer with some really pleasingly practical, ramshackle mech and exosuit designs.

Cinematic reveal trailer for The Forever Winter.Watch on YouTube

Nvidia’s new app merges their control panel, GeForce Experience and RTX Experience apps together into one, and won’t require you to login to use. Truly groundbreaking. Can someone now convince HP to make it so I don’t have to login in order to print stuff from my own printer?

Escape Academy is a fun, charming escape room game with co-op, and its latest DLC, set in a magic school, is out now .

FRIDAY AT LAST

Instruct the ion beam crews to open fire! FEED THE MAW.

Here’s a video of the forthcoming Adventure mode for the Steam edition of Dwarf Fortress, feat. Tarn Adams of Bay12 Games.

Eleventh Hour Games founder Judd Cobler has written a recap post about Last Epoch’s launch. Apparently there were 150,000 people playing within 20 minutes of launch, and the game’s servers have been struggling.

Age of Mythology Retold, the remastered Age of Empires spin-off, has finally resurfaced with a close look at its new character models - and the news that it will be out on Steam and Game Pass this year .

Age of Empires 2’s Definitive Edition is getting its first “campaign-focused” expansion in next month’s Victors and Vanquished, letting you lead Vikings, Japanese clans and more in 19 scenarios - most based on popular community mods.

Age of Empires 4 will follow up the RTS series’ best-selling expansion of all time with the start of its latest season and a new free-for-all mode this spring , as Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition prepares to add Denmark and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth factions in late 2024.

Age of Empires Mobile will bring the storied RTS to your phone screen this summer , as the free-to-play spin-off mixes series’ base-building, resource management and battles into an online multiplayer experience.

Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown, Ubisoft’s excellent metroidvania, is getting extra content and modes in free updates soon . It’s already an excellent game, if you haven’t played it, as Katharine’s review explained .

I’m in love with Night-Runners and its free Prologue demo on Steam . It’s a racing game which harks back to the classics (and cult classics) of the PlayStation 1 and 2 era, while also bringing its own open world, procedural, and narrative ambitions.

Nadeo have been celebrating the 20th anniversary of Trackmania by gradually adding cars, tracks and themes from the 2003 original to the latest iteration of the game. That work will finish on February 27th with the release of the Trackmania: Rally Update. Here’s a trailer:

Turbo Kid is a metroidvania sequel to a 2015 action-comedy-horror movie, and it has a new demo and an April 10th release date . I really like the look of its BMX bike riding.

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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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Fantasy extraction game Dungeonborne was February’s most played Steam Next Fest demo

Stormgate, Pacific Drive, Homeworld 3 and Backpack Battles round out the top five

Image credit:Mithril Interactive

February’s Steam Next Fest demo bonanza officially concluded on Monday, and Valve have now revealed the 50 most played games you all tucked into across the week-long event. Ordered by the number of unique players that spent time with them during Next Fest proper (meaning all those early demo plays from earlier in the month haven’t been counted), the most popular game of the lot was one that was only formally announced right at the end of January. So congratulations Dungeonborne - your blend of PvPvE dungeon crawling and fantasy skelly monsters clearly struck a chord with this year’s Next Festers.

Valve don’t provide any extra context or numbers to show exactly what it takes to rise to the top of the Next Fest charts, but according to developers Mithril Interactive, they had over 19K concurrent players during their Next Fest playtest - a feat that’s helped catapult them from the top 500 of Steam’s most wishlisted games right into the top 50, all in the space of two weeks since it was first announced.

“This playtest has affirmed that our vision for Dungeonborne is on the right track,” the devs wrote in a Steam blog post on Monday. “Armed with your insights, we’re prepared to address the challenges identified during this test, such as balancing classes and gear disparity, enhancing anti-cheat measures, and polishing other gameplay details. Rest assured, every piece of feedback will be thoroughly reviewed and combined with our data analysis to guide our future development plans and release strategy.”

As for the rest of the top 50, which you can see in full here , you’ll find several familiar names in the list - many of which we clocked early in our team recommendation list , as well as many of our other demo posts we’ve written over the last few weeks.

Starcraft spiritual successor Stormgate came in at number two, followed by first-person car roguelike Pacific Drive , the recently delayed space epic Homeworld 3 and the indie autobattler Backpack Battles . Elsewhere in the top ten, I’m also pleased to see that poker roguelike Balatro and Paradox’s Civ-rival Millenia made the cut, as well as the Hollow Knight -esque Deviator .

It’s a pretty stacked list all told - clearly a sign that Next Festers have pretty good taste at the end of the day, though the fact that everyone ignored the beautiful Until Then is a crime I will never forgive (I’m sure it’s no.51). The demo’s still live, too, so you simply have no excuse. Go get it played.

In fact, most Next Fest demos still seem to be going strong at the moment, so if you’re wondering what all the fuss is about with some of these chart toppers, then there’s a good chance you still have time to find out.

Backpack Battles

PC

Dungeonborne

Video Game

Homeworld 3

PC

Pacific Drive

PS5 , PC

Stormgate

Video Game

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