What’s on your bookshelf?: former Zachtronics’ Zach Barths and Matthew Burns

read-only

Image credit:oldbookillustrations.com

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! It’s a double feature this week - Zach Barths and Matthew Burns of former Zachtronics fame! (Do read Edwin’s interview with Zach on their unrealised 40K factory game ). Cheers Zach and Matthew! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelves?

What are you currently reading?

Zach: I started reading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series during COVID lockdown, which is somewhat out of character for me. I’m usually pretty skeptical of long-running genre series (or snobby?), but there’s something about Discworld that is just the right kind of comforting when I’m looking for an easy read. I’m currently on my 17th book, Making Money. It’s fine. Not the best in the series, but hardly the worst. It’s not really about that!

Matthew: I just finished Takaoka’s Travels by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, which is equal parts delightful, surreal, and disturbing. I enjoyed it so much I found myself wishing for more, but it also feels right that it’s as short as it is. This might sound strange to anyone who is familiar with either one of these works but in a way its playfulness and humanity reminded me of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis. In nonfiction I am slowly making my way through Uncommon Ground, edited by William Cronon, a collection of academic essays about environmentalism, its origins, its popularization, and its commodification at the hands of various corporate interests. It was published in the 90s, when interest in “nature” and natural products moved into the mainstream. Originally I picked it up as research for a project that did not go anywhere, but it’s interesting enough on its own for me to keep going.

What did you last read?

Zach: The last fiction book I read was The Counting House by Gary Sernovitz, which is basically what you’d get if someone turned Matt Levine’s Money Stuff column into a novel. It’s about the Chief Investment Officer at a prestigious university, and how his life falls apart as he begins to question his job and, by extension, the nature of the modern finance-driven economy. Even though the book is technically about finance, I felt like everything in it completely applied to my life in games - the obsession with financial performance, the fear of losing your edge, the nihilism that may or may not be at the core of it all - in a way that totally consumed me. The last non-fiction book I read was Hella Nation by Evan Wright, a 2009 collection of essays that each focus on a different subculture, like eco-anarchists and neo-Nazis and porn creators. My favorite part about it was how in every essay, without fail, you’d find that Evan Wright was somehow also a character in the story. My favorite kind of journalism!

Matthew: I read The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. These stories are funny, imaginative, and filled with strange imagery. They’re more lighthearted than Calvino’s more formally experimental works and I think I enjoyed them more for that reason.

Zach: I’m curious about Uncertain Ground: Citizenship In An Age Of Endless, Invisible War by Phil Klay, which I guess is about exactly what it sounds like? As an American I think a lot about complicity (our previous game Mobius Front ‘83 touched on this) and would love to read something modern on this topic. As someone who loves David Foster Wallace’s essays, I also want to take a swing at Infinite Jest, but there’s no way I’m actually going to make it through that book…

Matthew: I’d like to read The Apple in the Dark by Clarice Lispector. I read Benjamin Moser’s translation of The Hour of the Star over the summer, where he talks about trying to preserve Lispector’s unusual word order and other characteristics, and that sufficiently motivated me to seek out more. In nonfiction, I’m interested in reading Werner Herzog’s memoir, Every Man For Himself And God Against All.

What quote or scene from a book has stuck with you?

Zach: Everyone remembers the opening line from Neuromancer (“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”) but what about that terrible sex scene that comes out of nowhere! My wife and I joke about it sometimes. I have to imagine that after Neuromancer came out, everyone told him it was terrible and then he basically never tried again in any of his books. It’s okay, William Gibson, you’re still my favorite author.

Matthew: In The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa writes, “To express oneself is always a mistake.” I try to remember this before I make a social media post, or do an interview like this, or before I get my own book ready to release, as I’m doing right now (that’s a little tease, I guess).

What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read ?

Zach: There is a book called Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, by David Friedman, which is about, unsurprisingly, legal systems that are very different from ours. I promise, it’s much more exciting than it sounds, and is very readable and full of fun anecdotes like how in A ancient Athens you were allowed to go into someone’s house if you thought they stole something from you, provided you did it naked so that you couldn’t plant or steal anything yourself! It also includes examples of situated legal systems (legal systems that exist within other legal systems) and anarchist legal systems (legal systems where no one is in charge, but laws still exist) that got me thinking about company structures and led directly to the creation of Coincidence , our new anarchist game studio where all the ex-Zachtronics developers are working on new games, including some proper puzzle games! People can sign up for our mailing list to find out when we announce and release them.

Matthew: I don’t find myself recommending fiction much, since tastes vary so widely. For game designers, I recommend Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll, an investigation into how casinos and the gambling industry design their products to create compulsion loops, and the effects that these design choices have on the lives of people who are at risk of becoming problem gamblers.

What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?

Zach: That is a tough question for me, because I feel like any game adapted from a book would probably turn into something that is much too long and drawn out for me to want to play it. But, looking through my Goodreads history… I think I could get behind a Transmetropolitan game. I can picture it in my head, where I guess it’s a mid-90s voice-acted point-and-click adventure game? You play as outlaw journalist Spider Jerusalem, walking the city, talking to people, searching for what’s really going on, taking pictures and filing stories to let everyone know the truth… if anyone wants to publish this, get in touch!

Matthew: People may know that Black Myth: Wukong (and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West before it) loosely adapts a Chinese historical fantasy novel, Journey to the West. Interestingly, Journey to the West itself was inspired by a real historical pilgrimage conducted a thousand years earlier, in the seventh century, by the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzhang. He recounted his journey in a work called The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions in 646 CE. Instead of being a rollicking adventure story with lots of humor and hijinks, as Journey to the West is, Record of the Western Regions is a much drier but important historical chronicle of a religious pilgrimage by a devout follower who ventured the long way around the Himalayas, through what is today Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, in order to reach India in search of Buddhist scriptures that had not yet made their way into China. I couldn’t help but feel that Xuanzhang’s descriptions of the numerous small kingdoms he comes across have a procedurally generated quality to them: he ritually mentions the name, the circumference and population of the capital city, the temperament of the people, local crops and fruits, how many temples and monks there are and of what denomination, and other facts. Interspersed with the straightforward description of lands and peoples are credulous retellings of fantastical legends and religious miracles. It’s fun to imagine a game like 80 Days set in this time and place. More generally, I’m interested in the way narrative games can follow the form of a pilgrimage, and I think The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions would be a rich and unique source of material for something like that.

Zach’s mention of Neuromancer’s opening line reminds me of something I’ve thought about before. It’s a little shaky but here goes. I’ve heard it said that the opening line of Eliot’s Prufrock (“spread out against the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table”) marked the birth point of modernist poetry. If we also take for granted that Gibson’s sky simile was the origin of Cyberpunk, might we create some more literary genres simply by comparing the sky to various vividities that encapsulate the age? I say yes.

‘The RPS comment section where several dozen genres were invented through sky similes’ is something I’d love to be able to reference in the future. Of course, the more genres there are, the more books will be written, moving the invisible goalposts that mark this column’s very secret goal further into impossibility. Sucks for next week’s guest, I suppose. Book for now!

Rock Paper Shotgun is better when you sign in

Sign in and join us on our journey to discover strange and compelling PC games.

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

Rock Paper Shotgun is better when you sign in

Sign in and join us on our journey to discover strange and compelling PC games.