If you have been living in the endgame of ARC Raiders for a while, you probably feel the same slow burn of frustration I do, especially when it comes to ARC Raiders BluePrint drops. You wrap up the main quests, max out the workbench, clear the usual content, and then you hit this weird quiet spot where all that is left seems to be blueprint farming. After 80+ hours, seeing barely a couple dozen schematics in your collection feels rough, and it is easy to think the game is wasting your time. But the more you sit with it, the more it starts to feel like we are reading the whole system in the wrong way.

Most of us come in treating blueprints like any other long‑term collectible. If there are 74 of them, then the brain goes, right, the “real” goal is to tick all 74 boxes. That is how a lot of RPGs work: you farm until the collection screen is full, then you move on. ARC Raiders does not really play by those rules. You can clear a big raid like Stella Montis, walk out with a bag full of high‑tier pink gear, and still not see a single new blueprint. That is not just bad luck or a tuning issue that will magically get patched out. The way the drops feel stingy seems baked into the whole idea of how the game wants you to move between characters.

The real twist is the Expedition Project. On paper it sounds harsh: retire your Raider, lose all your stash, lose your blueprints, keep only some long‑term progression and perks. A lot of players just bounce off that. You look at your hard‑earned schematics and think, no way I am throwing that away. But once you try it, the structure of the game shifts. Instead of one endless character grind, every Raider starts to feel like its own run, like a long‑form roguelite. Maybe your first character stumbles into a bunch of shotgun and close‑range builds, so you lean into that. On the next Expedition, the luck is different, you grab a totally new set of tools, and it pushes you into another style, whether you planned it or not.

When someone refuses to touch Expeditions, the late game quickly turns into a weird holding pattern. You sit there chasing a near‑impossible 100 percent blueprint collection on one character, even though the systems are kind of screaming at you to move on. Because the drops are so rare, the game feels dead between the odd lucky schematic. You log in, run the same routes, open the same chests, and nothing really changes. The December update and future patches will probably throw in more endgame hooks, sure, but right now the blueprint grind, on its own, is not meant to carry your motivation for weeks.

Once you treat each Raider as a run, the scarcity stops being this constant headache and becomes part of the fun, even if it is still a bit brutal. You work with the handful of blueprints you actually have instead of the fantasy loadout in your head. You improvise more. Some builds are janky but memorable, and that is the point. When you finally feel like the current setup has run its course, that is when the Expedition wipe makes sense, not as a loss, but as a fresh shuffle of the deck that might throw you new gear and another way to play, including the next rare BluePrint.