What can a 34-year-old Sonic level teach us about videogame light?

Starstruck

Image credit:Sega / Rock Paper Shotgun / Fandom

No videogame fantasy setting will ever disquiet me as much as an empty business park at night under blue and yellow floodlights. A business park, or the access road down the side of a corrugated steel warehouse, where the alcoves cast by the LEDs look like a procession of hooded figures beneath the fixed, unblinking blackness of the sky.

I can’t actually be present in that scene, mind. I don’t belong there. No being does, not even the people who come by day to fill the striped lines with cars or raise the shutters on the loading bays. Instead, I have to be travelling past very fast. Preferably, I will be looking out the window of a train that shows the place for only a few seconds. I will feel as though I’ve glimpsed another planet’s scrolling surface in a mirror. Except this isn’t right. I will never find the words for it. Nothing written above is adequate. Balls.

The nearest I’ve come to experiencing those emotions in a videogame is the Star Light Zone. It’s the fifth Zone in the original Sonic The Hedgehog from 1991. It occupies a construction yard under a perfect starfield - a swelling landscape of green rivets, silver scaffolding and dim purple brick, with strips of skyscraper burning quietly in the distance.

It’s an interlude of sorts, an exhalation between the watery crush of the Labyrinth and the sawtooth racket of Scrap Brain. There are spiked ball traps and coughing fire cannons but you are freer, here, to build momentum, almost as free as you are in the opening Green Hill Zone. There are fewer nasty surprises waiting at the end of ramps and loops, fewer knuckled interior segments to cramp your stride. The music is a cheery, nostalgic pop number that feels like it’s gently bleeding off the adrenaline accumulated in the first four Zones, like it’s getting you ready for bed.

The Star Light Zone isn’t altogether a reprieve, however. There is an… expectancy to it, a chill. Partly it’s that the landscape is portrayed as unfinished: in the foreground below the glittering skyscrapers there are brick shells with eyeless windows. But it’s also eerie, perhaps, because it gets you thinking about the quality of the game’s light.

Sonic’s worlds are luminous throughout, by design and thanks to the graphics technology of the era. Such shadows that exist are crisp and ornamental, cleanly painted onto a geology of bevels that always appears illuminated, even in dingier regions such as Labyrinth, and even when the surfaces are notionally inside the architecture and terrain. By virtue of its setting, Star Light Zone makes a point of this pervasive radiance, gives it a context. The CRT glare takes on something of the stark steadiness of those loading bays and carparks I so enjoy being carried past at night.

I can imagine an exhausted Sonic Team developer listening to the Star Light Zone music on their Walkman while riding the train home in 1991. Or perhaps, conceiving of the level itself in those conditions. Sonic was the product of crunch, with members of its seven-strong development team working 19 hour days for six months. Crunch is the product, among other things, of artificial light, which allows for an extension of the working day, of consumption patterns and of systemic surveillance, limited only by the human being’s feckless and unsporting need for sleep.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

Electric light is among the parameters for what Jonathan Crary calls a world marked by “the absoluteness of availability, and hence the ceaselessness of needs and their incitement, but also their perpetual non-fulfillment”, in his book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep . It is an element in the creation of “a non-stop work site” and “a zone of insensibility” - a culture that “is like a state of emergency, when a bank of floodlights are suddenly switched on in the middle of the night, seemingly as a response to some extreme circumstances, but which never get turned off and become domesticated into a permanent condition”.

Videogames in general are party to this great sleeplessness, this searching insomnia. However urgently they may try to fill themselves with shadows, their worlds are unavoidably ablaze. They are among the screens that erode our diurnal rhythms and render our rest time productive. Screens without backlighting do exist - people have experimented with running video on electronic paper - but for the most part, a videogame’s world is only truly dark when you turn it off.

The literal and philosophical insomnia outlined by Crary in his book isn’t wholly unpleasant. Artificial lighting has given rise to a spectrum of thinkers, artists and wanderers who seek to cross certain thresholds after dark. “Nightwalkers experience urban life as a form of phantasmagoria, one that they are at the same time utterly immersed in and oddly detached from,” writes Matthew Beaumont. Given some level of privilege - cities vary, and not everybody has a secure home and a bed to return to - wakefulness may become reverie and a kind of gracefully listing hyperfocus. “I’ll spend an hour watching the rooftop of my house, which does not need to be watched,” writes Debbie Urbanski of her own experiences of insomnia.

At the risk of Hot Takesmanship, I think people who make, play and write about video games could stand to talk in more complex ways about the operation of light - going beyond questions of quantifiable photorealism or catch-all ‘atmospheric depth’, and delving into both the phantasmagorical and the social dynamics that pervade even the hermetically sealed-off, cleanly goal-oriented worlds of singleplayer games. As Don Slater writes in an essay for Architectural Review , “lighting is structured through complex processes: policing, urban development and place-marketing policies, street lighting standards and engineering training, residents’ fears and demands, tourism infrastructures and so on. Lighting materialises opposed, unequally valued spaces for entirely different sorts of people”.

<img loading=“lazy” src=“https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/Dishonored1_Yfqyr19.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 view of an illuminated “wanted” poster and a shuttered urban sawmill from the shadows in Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider. - 5”>

Image credit:Microsoft / PCGamer

Videogames inherit such value judgements, mixed with ‘pure’ design considerations such as how to guide a player to an exit, or how to make a gunfight more difficult. Slater contrasts the “soft puddling effect” of preserved gaslights in heritage sites to the way “lighting enters social housing estates under the sign of securitisation and public order, with the intention not only of rendering every movement visible (ostensibly to disarm threats) but to declare that threatening movements define this kind of space”. This is light without “character and value”, reduced to its capacity to expose.

Star Light Zone’s lighting isn’t quite that characterless - this is an artistic representation, not an actual construction site - but it has something of the same lethally soft, lidless quality, which I now find hard to read apart from the material reality of overworked developers. However much it may try to simmer you down, I come out the other end of that Zone feeling Scrap Brained indeed, far too wired to sleep.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Android , iOS , PS3 , Xbox 360 , Nintendo Wii

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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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