Arc Raiders once again nerfs generous blueprint drop rates, but its hurricanes are still worth braving

Arc Raiders' first patch since its mammoth Shrouded Sky update has arrived, and while it's (predictably) much smaller, there are a few interesting tweaks and fixes under the extraction shooter's hood. The most notable is that Embark Studios is nerfing the drop rates of blueprints after the new Hurricane map condition became a very lucrative way to farm them, and it feels like history is repeating itself.

Cast your mind back to the multiplayer game's Cold Snap update. In its first few days, Arc Raiders players could fairly reliably extract from Cold Snap runs with plenty of blueprints in tow. I wondered at the time if this may have been an intentional move by Embark to give further incentive for players to try the new wintery map condition, but to be honest, the snowy scenes, cold weather mechanic, and Candleberry farming were all enticing enough anyway. The blueprint bonanza was swiftly dialed down though, with Embark cutting drop rates significantly.

With the introduction of the Hurricane map condition in Shrouded Sky last week, it seems a similar situation has arisen. The First Wave Caches that spawn in Hurricane matches have been serving up a very generous amount of blueprints, allowing players to unlock more items for crafting, sell them for big chunks of currency, or cash them into their Expedition Projects to work towards the next account wipe. These special Caches have been spitting out blueprints like there's no tomorrow.

While braving the treacherous conditions of the Hurricanes should absolutely be rewarding, Embark is once again taking action to make them less of a reliable blueprint farm, specifically. "Lowered the drop rate of rare blueprints slightly and raised the drop rate for high tier materials in First Wave Caches on the Hurricane map condition," it confirms in the new set of patch notes.

In a dev note elaborating on this change, Embark sounds surprised at how players have been able to routinely find these Cache locations, but is keen to keep the incentives for finding them relatively high. "Caches will still be a solid way to find blueprints, just not to the point where you can reliably walk away from every session with three [to] five of them."

Elsewhere in today's update, Embark has "fixed an exploit that allowed players to put weapons in a safe pocket without the Safekeeper Augment," so to anyone that's been rinsing that: you're now out of luck. A quest completion issue regarding the Worth Your Salt mission has also been rectified, as have some instances of Arc enemies causing performance drops.

While my head has certainly been turned by Marathon due to last weekend's Server Slam (and some recent Arc Raiders burnout), Shrouded Sky has certainly been a strong update for the game. New enemy types are also welcome, and the cinematic terror of the Hurricane map condition is also extremely exciting. It hasn't moved the needle too much in terms of player count from what I can see, but given it's continuously hitting Steam peaks north of 200,000 players, I'm sure Embark will be more than satisfied with the stability.