Beautiful Light beginner guide: how the raid works and how to prepare
A Beautiful Light raid drops you and two squadmates into a hostile map to secure an artifact and extract by helicopter, while six other players hunt you as monsters. Die before the helicopter lands and everything you carried in is gone.
Beautiful Light has not released, so nobody outside the playtests has played the current build. This guide sticks to what Deep Worlds has actually explained: how a raid is structured, what the roles are, and what you can prepare now. Tips that would need in-game experience are not here, and no site can honestly give them yet.
The raid in one table
| Players per raid | 24: 6 squads of 3 operators, plus 6 anomalies |
|---|---|
| Your goal as an operator | Enter, secure the artifact, extract alive |
| Your goal as an anomaly | Hunt, kill and eat operators so nobody extracts |
| Death | Full loss: the kit you brought is gone |
| Maps at Early Access | 2 |
| Platform | PC, see platforms |
The four beats of a raid
Deep Worlds describes the loop in four steps, and each is a place the run can end.
1. Enter. You drop in with two squadmates, carrying weapons, armour and gadgets you own. The map is full of hazards, other squads, and things that are not human. 2. Secure. Find the artifact. If another squad already has it, take it from them. The first squad to secure it gets an advantage, and becomes everyone's target. 3. Extract. Leave by helicopter with what you carry. This is where raids are won and lost, because everyone knows where you are heading. 4. Progress. What you bring out feeds your progression, and since 2026 that runs through a skill tree with branches for combat, support, objectives and hunting anomalies.
Three things that make it different
- Some monsters are people. Six of the 24 players are anomalies. An AI creature can be learned, a player adapts to how your squad plays.
- Anomalies have their own game. They level up by killing and eating operators, which unlocks abilities and new creatures to play.
- The map fights you too. Radiation zones drain stamina then health, gas mask filters are consumable, the mask muffles sound, and the weather changes on its own.
What you can prepare right now
- Check your PC. The minimum asks for an i5 8600K, 16 GB of RAM, a GTX 1070 and 60 GB on an SSD. The system requirements page has both tiers and the FPS figures Deep Worlds published in 2026.
- Get into a playtest. Access runs through the official Discord, in waves picked at random. The playtest page explains how, and how the waves will grow.
- Learn the map. Ground Zero is the map every test has used, and it is being restructured with seven new points of interest: see Ground Zero.
- Learn the bestiary. Knowing what a Juggernaut, a Wendigo or a Reaver does is the difference between a bad surprise and a plan: the anomalies guide.
- Learn the words. The community uses QRF, artifact, PDA and extraction constantly: the glossary.
What nobody can tell you yet
Any site listing the "best weapons", a tier list or a meta for Beautiful Light is guessing. No statistics are public, the build changes every few weeks, and the raid loop itself is being rewritten. What exists officially is the list of weapons Deep Worlds has named, and that is all.
When the game ships, this page gets the real thing: loadouts, routes and what actually works, tested rather than imagined.
Sources
- Beautiful Light on Steam: raid composition, objectives, progression, Early Access content
- Deep Worlds news on Steam: the four beat loop, the raid rework (January and February 2026), the playtest reports
- Deep Worlds' official Discord (discord.gg/project-bl), #leaks-wip: radiation and gas masks (March 2026), the skill tree (August and September 2026)
BL Guide, unofficial community coverage of Beautiful Light. Every figure on this page comes from an official source, and anything unconfirmed says so: how we check.