Blueprints are the real endgame loot in Arc Raiders. They turn a one-off weapon find into something permanent you can craft at your benches, and they all sell for a flat 5,000 coins if you pull a duplicate. The problem is they’re rare, and the game never clearly explains where they actually come from.
There are two parts to getting them efficiently: understanding how the loot pool works, and knowing the specific locations and routes that tend to spit out more blueprints than others.
How blueprints work in Arc Raiders
Blueprints are single-use items that unlock recipes at the crafting benches in your Raider Den. Once you extract with one:
- Open your inventory in the Den.
- Select the blueprint.
- Choose the option to “Learn and Consume”.
That permanently unlocks the recipe for the relevant bench tier (for example, Anvil on Gunsmith I, or Defibrillator on Medical Lab II). Every blueprint can instead be sold for 5,000 coins if you already know it.
There are just over 70 distinct blueprints spread across weapons, gun parts, attachments, augments, grenades, traps, and healing items. Some recipes also appear as trial or quest rewards, but they still exist in the scavenging loot pool unless explicitly flagged as quest-only.
Where blueprints can drop
Blueprints are technically global loot: they can appear in almost any container or on specialized caches. In practice, different containers and locations have noticeably higher odds.
| Loot source | Typical blueprint types | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Red and green lockers | Weapon, attachment, augments | Gym/school-style lockers in buildings and facilities; strong overall rates. |
| Weapon cases / gun crates | Weapon blueprints (Il Toro, Anvil, etc.), attachments | Often in high-tier areas, behind locked or barricaded doors. |
| Duffel bags, backpacks, golf bags, suitcases | General weapon and attachment BPs | Common in culverts, buses, crashed aircraft sections, residential areas. |
| Desks, drawers, kitchen cabinets | Mixed; anything from Bettina to Extended Barrel | Looks like low-tier loot, but purple blueprints can show up here. |
| Red “security” lockers | Higher tier weapon and attachment BPs | Notably strong inside hospitals and offices. |
| Raider caches / capsules | Weapons, augments, Anvil and other guns | Backpacks and boxes in “raider stash” hideouts and highway gaps. |
| Grenade cases | Grenades and trap BPs (Wolfpack, Trigger ’Nade, mines) | Often near military, industrial, or bunker-style spaces. |
| Behind key-locked or barred doors | All types; generally higher rarity | Consistently better loot, including multiple blueprints in one room. |
| Harvester event reward canisters | Legendary gun BPs (Jupiter, Equalizer) | Can drop blueprints in the end canisters; wall containers may sometimes hold more. |
Night Raids double the chance for rare loot. That multiplier applies to containers across the map, which makes night versions of your favorite routes significantly better for blueprint hunting.
Best container types to prioritize
If you don’t want to memorize map-specific routes, focus on these container types any time you see them:
- Red and green lockers: Reliable sources of weapon and attachment blueprints, and often augments.
- Weapon cases: The most common place to see gun blueprints, especially in locked rooms or on towers and rooftops.
- Duffel bags, backpacks, golf bags, suitcases: Frequently hide purple blueprints in otherwise quiet corners.
- Raider caches/capsules: Always worth checking. Some hard spawns seem to roll BPs extremely often.
- Grenade cases: For Wolfpack, mines, and other explosive or utility recipes.
Standard cabinets, desks, and even trash cans can still roll high-tier blueprints. Players repeatedly report finding Wolfpack, Bettina, and Extended Barrel in totally mundane drawers and kitchen cupboards. Treat “trash” containers as real lottery tickets, especially in red-outline high-tier zones.
Map-wide rules that boost blueprint drops
Several game systems tilt the odds in your favor:
- Night Raids: Rare loot chance is doubled. This makes keys, high-tier components, and blueprints drop more often.
- Red loot zones: Red-outlined areas on the map have higher base loot quality and density than yellow or unmarked zones.
- Key-locked and barricaded doors: Anything behind a keycard door or a bar you have to break tends to have stronger loot tables.
- Perks like Security Breach: Breachable containers inside secured areas can roll multiple blue or purple items and occasionally blueprints, though recent patches have reduced how often top-tier items appear.
- Harvester event: End-of-event canisters are a consistent way to get legendary weapon blueprints, especially Jupiter and Equalizer.
Keys themselves drop randomly, with noticeably better drop rates during night raids. Once you have a key, repeatedly hitting its door across several raids is one of the most efficient blueprint strategies in the game.
Buried City blueprint route: Space Travel Building and hospital
Buried City (sometimes surfaced as “Barret/Buried City”) holds one of the cleanest blueprint farms because the extraction is very close to a rich interior and a hospital.
Space Travel Building (Buried City)
On the city map, the Space Travel Building is a multi-floor office block that stacks several good loot features into a single structure.
- Entry: Climb the ledge to enter around the 4th floor without needing a key.
- 4th floor: The key target here is the JKV Employee Access Card. If it spawns and you have it, use it to unlock the nearby office for more high-tier loot. Otherwise, push upward.
- 6th floor: This is the main blueprint floor. Sweep every: Wolfpack and other blueprints regularly appear in these drawers, and power rods often sit in the breachable cabinets.
- Desk drawer and filing cabinet
- Metal cabinet and “server” unit (breach them)
- 5th floor: Drop down after the 6th. Two sets of open-plan office cubicles are packed with drawers and cabinets that can roll weapon and attachment blueprints.
The big advantage of this building is that extraction is right outside. You can hit 6th → 5th floors, dump your loot, and extract in one short run.
Buried City hospital (medical and general BPs)
Still on Buried City, the hospital is one of the strongest locations for medical and mixed blueprints:
- There are three to four floors; hit all of them.
- Loot every cabinet, drawer, and bedside storage.
- The top floor contains red lockers with excellent blueprint potential.
Defibrillator and other medical items seem to drop here more often than elsewhere, but weapon blueprints like Bettina can also show up in these medical spaces. The game skews toward theme (med gear in medical areas), but doesn’t lock the loot table to it.
Blue Gate underground: battery door, mini-game, and “cheese” room
The Blue Gate map hides a surprisingly dense underground complex that functions as a blueprint and high-value loot hub, even though it isn’t flagged as a major point of interest.
Getting into the underground
- Look for an unmarked building; when you approach, a staircase icon appears on your HUD.
- Enter and ride the zipline down to the bottom floor.
- Head through the large door at the back to step into the main facility.
Once inside, the colored lines on the floor (especially the blue line) become your navigation anchor.
Area 1: Yellow-door locker room
- Follow the blue line until it merges with a red line.
- Just before that merge point, turn left into a doorway marked with yellow paint.
- Cross the room to a small breachable door in the back-right corner.
Behind that breach is a compact locker room filled with:
- Lockers
- Small containers on the floor
- Occasional weapon cases
This single room regularly yields blue and purple loot, including blueprints, in just a few seconds of looting.
Area 2: Color mini-game cache
- Near where the blue and red floor lines meet, find a small table with a terminal.
- Activate it and wait for the screen to flash a solid color (red, blue, or yellow).
- Follow paint of that color on the walls, not the floor lines, until you reach an X on the floor with a loot container.
This cache doesn’t always deliver huge upgrades, but with the path right beside Area 1, it’s efficient to grab on your way.
Area 3: Battery-locked “red room”
- While following the blue line from the entrance, watch for a locked door on your left. This leads to the red room.
- Somewhere else in the facility is a panel holding three removable batteries. Their exact location randomizes between a handful of spawn spots.
- Pull all three batteries and carry them, one by one, back to the slots beside the red-room door.
- Once all three are in place, open the door and loot the room, especially the weapon chest at the back.
The red room frequently contains multiple high-tier items and weapon blueprints. One important quirk: the door cannot be opened from the inside. If someone closes it on you, you’re stuck until extraction or death.
Keycard “cheese” room (no key required)
Nearby, there is a keycard-locked area that you can enter with a small movement exploit:
- From the yellow-marked door that leads to Area 1, instead take an early right and go down a long staircase.
- At the bottom is a room gated by a keycard door.
- On the back wall sits a large climbable structure. Climb it, then line up a sprint and dive through the open window into the locked room.
- After looting, open the door from inside to exit, even without a key.
This space can roll the same kind of high-tier loot as other locked rooms, including augments like Looting Mk.3 (Survivor) and various weapon and attachment blueprints. It’s a risky maneuver in PvP-heavy lobbies, but extremely efficient when successful.
Dam Battlegrounds: highway hideout and control tower
Dam Battlegrounds has become a community favorite for blueprint farming thanks to a handful of quiet, repeatable spots.
Highway gap raider cache (strong for Anvil)
Between Raider Outpost East and East Broken Bridge, the raised highway ends over a dusty gap. Under that broken stretch is a hidey hole that almost always spawns raider containers.
- Approach from either nearby spawn and head under the end of the raised highway.
- Look for a gap or hideout area with a raider backpack and box.
- Open all containers and any weapon case that may spawn there.
Players have repeatedly pulled Anvil, Bettina, and other weapon blueprints from this setup in a single run, sometimes alongside a weapon case that guarantees a gun and can roll more BPs. It’s a fast 30–60 second sprint from common spawns, which makes it ideal to hit at the start of multiple raids until you get the Anvil blueprint.
Dam culverts, buses, and downed aircraft
A broader route on the Dam Battlegrounds layers several good container types:
- Concrete culverts: Some culverts have missing grates; crouch-walk inside to find backpacks and suitcases. These have produced multiple purple blueprints.
- Buses and vehicles: Duffel bags and backpacks just off spawn can roll early blueprints; one player’s first BP came from a bus.
- Downed airplane sections: In the industrial north, a lower-level section of wreckage off the catwalks has yielded several purple blueprints from bags and cases in a small area.
When combined with the highway cache, you can chain all of these into a single Dam run: highway gap → culverts → airplane wreck → extract or continue looting.
Control tower jump spot
The dam’s control tower also hides a cluster of weapon cases and containers on and around the roof and upper levels:
- Climb or zipline up to the roof area.
- Drop down next to the ladder and grab the ledge to access a narrow ledge and windows.
- Loot weapon cases and containers near the windows and external walkways.
Some players previously used a window exploit to reach a fully locked interior room here, but that shutter now only opens from the inside. Even without the exploit, the exterior cases still offer a strong chance at gun blueprints.
Ruby Residences and other residential clusters
On the Dam map, Ruby Residences is a mid-sized apartment cluster of five to six buildings that function as a “blueprint density” zone if you’re willing to check every floor.
- Enter each building and sweep floor by floor.
- Open every drawer, wardrobe, cabinet, suitcase, and duffel.
- Pay special attention to luggage and backpacks; these often hold attachment blueprints.
Outside of named districts, random houses across maps regularly cough up blueprints as well. Trash cans, dresser drawers, and kitchen cabinets are all valid hits. The underlying rule is simple: in residential spaces, open everything.
Hunting specific blueprint types
Because loot is ultimately random, no location can guarantee a particular blueprint. There are, however, patterns that make certain types easier to chase.
| Blueprint type | Best places to focus | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Medical (Defibrillator, Vita Shot, Vita Spray) | Hospitals; medical rooms in research/admin buildings on higher floors | Medical spaces have more med-focused containers, but weapon BPs can still appear. |
| Grenades and traps (Wolfpack, mines, Trigger ’Nade) | Residential clusters, grenade cases, explosives-focused rooms | Wolfpack has dropped from residential drawers and trash cans; grenade cases are strong overall. |
| Early weapons (Il Toro, Burletta, Anvil) | Weapon cases in locked rooms; raider caches on Dam highway; Blue Gate underground; Buried City offices | Il Toro and Anvil are commonly reported from weapon cases and raider backpacks/boxes. |
| Legendary weapons (Jupiter, Equalizer) | Harvester event end reward canisters | These two are strongly associated with the Harvester’s canisters. |
| Augments (Looting Mk.3 variants, Tactical/Combat Mk.3) | Locked rooms in Blue Gate underground; high-tier indoor facilities | Looting Mk.3 (Survivor) in particular is reported from a specific breachable Blue Gate room. |
| Snap Hook | Utility-heavy loot zones; late-game residential/industrial spaces | Can also be obtained from the Raider Deck progression track at least once. |
Blueprints in Arc Raiders are meant to feel rare, and some players will get unlucky stretches where nothing drops for many hours. The only reliable way to push the odds back in your favor is to stack the advantages: queue into Night Raids, prioritize red zones, chase keys and locked doors, and loop through container-dense spots like the Buried City Space Travel Building, the Blue Gate underground complex, and Dam’s highway hideout. Over time, those routes build out a full library of recipes – and give you plenty of duplicate blueprints to bankroll the next batch of bench upgrades.
