“You gotta let some of the chaos in”: Diablo 2’s art lead explains what he doesn’t like about Diablo 4

And how his new game Darkhaven aims to channel the old Blizzard magic

Image credit:Blizzard Entertainment

Last week, Moon Beast Productions officially revealed Darkhaven , a new action- RPG in the spirit of Diablo II , but with a changing, destructible, procedurally generated world that both echoes Minecraft and takes inspiration from the Diablo modding scene. Moon Beast are made up of ARPG royalty – their senior staff include original Diablo senior designer, art director and writer Erich Schaefer, Diablo 2 art lead Philip Shenk and Diablo 2 programmer Peter Hu.

As you’d expect, the Darkhaven devs have many Thoughts about Diablo today, at once leveraging their credits for marketing (they’re about to launch a Kickstarter) and resisting the idea that they are making an unofficial Diablo sequel. I don’t get the sense that any of them outright despise Diablo IV - summarised by Alice Bell as “2023’s prettiest RSI machine” - but Shenk in particular argues that the game has squandered “the magic” of previous games by focussing on smooth progression and balancing and in general, “overly engineering the experience” in order to keep people glued to the game’s live service.

Image credit:Moon Beast Productions

All that’s from a chat I had with Shenk and Schaefer this week. At one point, I made the armchair designer observation that creating an ARPG with such a disorderly, malleable world is surely a nightmare for balancing and overall consistency. You need to ensure that players get their level-ups and gear of increasing rarity at a steady pace, and it’s hard to do that when, as in Darkhaven, people can dig through the majority of the terrain, or trigger a lich-summoning world event that slowly transforms the entire map into a necropolis.

Shenk pushed back on me a bit. “You mentioned about this, you know, perceived precision that needs to go into the design,” he said. “I feel like - not being the one who implements this, but I feel like that’s where the magic gets lost. Like, when you’re hammering down all the high points and levelling up all the low points, and trying to make smooth progressions. You know, like when Diablo 4 has their auto-scaling - nobody likes that, we’d like to have the spiky progression and we like to have the fun, cool moments.”

“I think it’s less precise than people think it should be,” he continued, “and I think that’s almost part of the problem with today’s games. They try to design it too perfectly and precisely, and the magic and the experimentation and the unexpected things, they never happen, you know – you gotta let some of the chaos in.”

Darkhaven’s chief instigator of chaos may be Erich Schaefer, partly because his process is to play the work-in-progress game everyday, and he doesn’t want to get bored. “I play the game constantly and make notes and badger people to get things done,” he told me. “Which requires, since I have to play it all the time, that it can’t be that straightforward. It has to be different all the time.

“So that’s why I concentrate on things being kind of radically different. The maps really matter and how they unfold and how you explore the world and open things up. It’s different every time and it opens new challenges, you can take on different things at different times. That makes it exciting enough for me to play it every day.

“The world can be destroyed,” Schaeffer added. “You can lose this game. I haven’t really seen it happen, other than faking it on purpose, but you could let the Necropolis take over. Basically, the game will end if it takes over the entire world, and wipes out all the waypoints, so there’s nowhere to resurrect.” If that happens to you in Darkhaven, you can start over in a new world with the same character. Myself, I like the idea of trying to survive inside a Necropolis. Moderate 2b2t vibes.

I returned to Shenk’s Diablo 4 comparison later in the interview, asking how Darkhaven’s own post-release updates will differ from Blizzard’s live service. Schaeffer began by noting that Moon Beast do not have Blizzard’s billions, so enormous story bolt-ons like Vessel Of Hatred are unfeasible. “I think the big difference is their campaigns that they do, their expansions are extraordinarily expensive,” he said. “We can’t really even compete with this kind of thing. “They put so much work into the cinematics and the new maps and the new classes - I guess we’re going to do that to some degree, but our procedural style and these event-driven things, we could just make little modules that fit into the world and, and hopefully give you at least as much entertainment as a new campaign, that’s good for one playthrough in Diablo 4.”

Shenk, meanwhile, linked Darkhaven’s approach to post-release updates back to his opening arguments about ‘designing too perfectly’, commenting that Moon Beast want to get away from the stifling philosophies of free-to-play games that are predictably designed for the sake of retention.

“I think Path Of Exile sort of started set this precedent, because it’s free to play,” he said. “Their business model is, they need to keep people coming back on a regular cadence, otherwise the business is in debt, right? You know, if you don’t have people coming in for new content and new reasons to spend, then you don’t have a business.

“And then you have these games that are like [pay upfront] retail games like Last Epoch or Diablo 3 or Diablo 4, that somehow took it upon themselves to compete with that. But now it’s like, well where are you making your money? If you’re not a free-to-play game, you’re spending a lot of money to make these seasons, but you’re not really getting the benefit for it, you know, and then you need to do a battle pass, or you need to do expansion packs, all manner and stuff.” (I assume here that by “not really getting the benefit”, Shenk means the larger share of eyeballs resulting from ‘giving your game away’.)

“So I mean, we have a lot of ideas, but mostly it’s like, let’s just try to make this game replayable forever,” he continued. “Diablo 2 feels that way to us, you know - you have to keep injecting new content, but not in the same way. It’s just magically held up for 20 plus years, because it’s always fun to do another run.

“That’s not true of a lot of games. It’s certainly not true of Diablo 4, or a lot of these linear campaign games. They need to inject expensive new content. And a lot of this is back to what we were talking about in the beginning. If you’re overly engineering the experience, and everything is prescribed - here’s what we want you to experience, this big event, and we want everybody competing with this big event, and we’re going to tightly design the boss, and there’s one or two ways to solve it… Where’s the magic in that?

“You’re just going through a quick-time event essentially,” Shenk argued. “Whereas Diablo 2 and Hellgate: London - Diablo 2 was a sandboxy game, right? You don’t know what your game is going to be like, and that’s half the fun.

“You kind of know the order of things that you’re going to get, [but] the loot you’re gonna find, you know, that was huge - you’d find some new item and it could be a white item and that’s like, I want to build my build around this, you know. So that’s where the chaos comes in.”

Look out for the rest of my chat with the Moon Beast developers soon. You can already find streamer footage of early Darkhaven test builds on Youtube, if you’re too frothy at the thought of self-propagating undead kingdoms to wait for my words.

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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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