With every new anime gacha game release—especially the ones chasing after Genshin Impact's success—you can expect to see a flood of character tier lists and build guides. But Arknights: Endfield, which just came out this week, isn't your typical anime gacha game.
For a lot of players, it's actually a surprisingly robust factory builder with some action RPG combat on the side. Rolling for the most powerful characters is only half the game; the rest is building the most efficient material processing plant you can. Now that everyone's realized what kind of game they're actually playing, someone went and built an entire simulator for designing factory blueprints to share with other players.
EndfieldTools is currently getting slammed with traffic because it's the best spot for sharing factory blueprints and testing out layouts without having to waste resources in-game. The factory planner is essentially a simplified version of the real thing with tools to simulate how efficient your setup truly is. I haven't made it far enough in the game to understand a lot of what's available, but I can already see how much easier it is to click and place buildings without having to jump through menus in the game.
The site is also buckling under the load of all the players who were not born to be Factorio freaks and just want blueprints to do the work for them. There are rows and rows of user-created blueprints that you can load up in the game with a unique code.
Somehow the blueprints page is more arcane than the terms gacha game players use on Reddit and Discord. I do not know what a "Cryston farm" is, nor do I know why I'd need "Infinite Seeds", but they sure sound useful. It looks like around 40,000 people have clicked on this blueprint called "26x27 all parts and bottles" so it must be providing something nobody else has the time for.
My assumption is that a lot of these blueprints are made for tryhards who want to suck out as much resources as possible to fuel all the character upgrades they need. Endfield's developers have found a new way to keep players optimizing their way out of having to pay real money for things. Some games have daily quests and open worlds full of collectibles to find, but Endfield has hundreds of materials that aren't going to process themselves.
The creator of EndfieldTools has been active on the Endfield Reddit mostly to ask people to be patient while the site struggles to keep up with demand. It seems to be fairly stable for now, but with the weekend coming up, you might want to save some blueprint codes in case it goes down.
