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Figuring out how to get blueprints in Arc Raiders has been a monkey on my back for 45 hours now. Almost all of the very few blueprints I've unlocked were obtained in my first few hours with the game, many of them dished out via quests like a crane game operator just handing you a prize after watching you angrily blow $30 in quarters. The last blueprint I found for myself was a green weapon stock, and that dopamine hit harder than a three-day weekend. Imagine a new gun. Ever since, I've left no stone unturned, no drawer unsearched, and no body unlooted, but I've been coming up empty. At this rate, my crafting bench family won't survive the winter.
Desperate for new blueprints, I turned to the greatest vault of totally-true information on the internet: Reddit. It's fun – and, I'm told, part of my job – to keep tabs on the communities of games that explode the way Arc Raiders has. Enough monkeys will produce Shakespeare, and enough gamers in a competitive multiplayer environment will produce some of the best improv you'll ever read. In my monitoring, between stealth kills and jolly cooperation and people complaining about PvP in their PvP game, a curious pattern began to emerge. Once, then twice, then too many times for me to in good conscience ignore, somebody claimed to have bagged a boatload of blueprints in the exact same way.
The golden ticket, these whisperers whispered, was to load up a night raid and hit up a residential area – the apartments in Dam Battlegrounds, for example, or the village in Blue Gate. By luck or by obscured game logic, these places were said – with the enthusiasm of an old wives' tale – to hold more blueprints than normal. My normal has been next to nothing, so any blueprints would be a step up. (This is one of the Arc Raiders economy's biggest problems, in my opinion, especially since you lose your blueprints on the Expedition prestige.)
Surely this will work
In particular, I'd seen multiple players claim that they'd found a Wolfpack blueprint hidden in a cupboard in a Blue Gate night raid. I would really like to unlock Wolfpack grenades to have a more reliable way to down high-level Arc, so it's probably my most-wanted blueprint. So, in the bold name of science, I grabbed a level 3 Stitcher, strapped on a basic green-tier loadout, and went to investigate Blue Gate at night. I considered bringing a free loadout, because why not, but I knew that if I did find a blueprint and ended up losing it because I didn't bring a backpack with a safety pocket, I'd never forgive myself.
I'm happy to say this panned out in the end. Through what is almost certainly a freakish coincidence, I found a Wolfpack blueprint in the Blue Gate village after barely an hour of night raid hunting. Following the raid event rotation, I started my search in a Buried City night raid, but all I found there was another player trying the exact same strategy but with much stronger gear than what I'd brought to bear. Ask me how I know. But for once, following Reddit's advice led me to an oasis and not a mirage.
Now, I'm not ready to declare this the go-to, never-fail method for finding blueprints. I'm pretty sure that I, like the players whose anecdotes I was emulating, just got lucky. Night raids have improved loot across the board, so it makes sense for rare items like blueprints to drop more commonly during them. On top of that, residential areas are both chock-full of loot instances and relatively uncontested compared to hotter, red-tier loot zones, so it also makes sense for them to have a higher perceived hit rate. All I know for sure is that I will try this again, and I now have a pile of Wolfpack grenades. I have that, plus three high-rarity guns that were graciously donated by another Blue Gate scavenger who I kindly escorted into the afterlife.
