TL;DR for new Raiders
- The job is to extract, not to kill. Any fair fight you walk into is already a mistake. Engage on your terms or slip away.
- Load your keys, blueprints, and best materials into the Safe Pocket before you die so death cannot take them.
- Run the Free Loadout while you learn maps and ARC behavior. Do not bring gear you would mourn until you know where you are going.
- Quiet wins. Sound tells the whole lobby where you are, so make noise only when it pays.
Survive first, kill second
Every good ARC Raiders habit starts from one idea: you keep what you carry out, and you lose everything the moment you go down before extracting. That single rule reshapes how you should play. A clean gunfight where both sides see each other and trade shots is a coin flip, and a coin flip with your whole stash on the line is bad math. The Raiders who climb fastest treat combat as the last option. They pick the angle, take the surprise, or back off and let the other squad eat the risk.
So we build this guide in the order that actually saves your loot: stop the bleeding first, fight smarter second, then grow your stash between raids.
Loss prevention: the Safe Pocket and the Free Loadout
The Safe Pocket is the most important slot in the game and most new players ignore it. Anything you place in it survives your death. Go down before extracting and every Safe Pocket item is auto-sent to your stash anyway. Fill it with the things you cannot easily replace: door and area keys, quest items, blueprints and schematics, and your single most valuable material stack. Weapons cannot go in there, so the choice is always loot versus loot, never gun versus gun.
You start with one Safe Pocket slot, and it only opens up when you have a real Augment equipped (the placeholder Augment on the item:free-loadout does not count). Grow it through Looting Augments: item:looting-mk2 raises you to two slots, and the Epic-tier Looting Augment takes you to three. Looting Mk. 2 drops in raids or sells from Trader Lance at the Clinic. Two extra protected slots is the difference between a death that stings and a death that wipes a week of progress.
The Free Loadout is the other half of loss prevention. The game hands every player a replenishable bare-bones weapon and kit that costs nothing from your stash. Take it out, raid, restock it for free, and repeat. Die in it and you lose nothing you care about. This is your training-wheels mode, and the smart play is to ride it far longer than your ego wants to.
Stop bringing your best gear
The most common way new Raiders bleed out their stash is hauling their finest weapon into a map they do not know yet. You die to an ARC patrol you did not hear or a player camping a corner you did not know existed, and the good gun goes with you.
Learn the map first with gear you will not miss. Once you know the loot zones, the ARC patrol routes, and where players funnel, that knowledge tells you which weapon to bring. Map sense comes before loadout choices, not the other way around. When you do start running custom kit, our Loadout Optimizer is the fast way to do it right: pick your Augment, and it locks shield compatibility and weight so you are not guessing in the menu.
Sound discipline
In ARC Raiders, noise is a flare you fire over your own head. Sprinting, slamming doors, crunching across glass, looting containers, gunfire, and explosives all broadcast your position to anyone nearby. The fix is simple to say and hard to do: make noise only when it earns you something.
Train your ears at the same time. Footsteps, gunshots, the rhythmic beep of an ARC probe, and birds scattering off a rooftop all tell you a threat is close. Spooked birds in particular mean a player just moved through an area. When a sound is near, get eyes on it before it gets eyes on you. Car alarms and similar devices scream your location across the map, so smash them the moment you trip one.
Two early skill-tree picks pay for themselves here. item:gentle-pressure cuts the noise you make while looting, and item:proficient-pryer shortens how long looting takes, so you spend less time exposed and standing still.
Combat and movement
When a fight is unavoidable, play it defensively. Peek, fire, duck back into cover, then reposition before you peek again. Health drops fast, and standing in the open to win a duel is how good runs end. If the fight looks lost, leave. A loaded extraction beats a heroic corpse.
Learn to holster your weapon to sprint. Putting your gun away moves you much faster than running armed, which is what gets you out of a collapsing firefight or to an extraction before the timer dies. The holster bind sits in your Settings, so check it and burn it into muscle memory. Slide and dive both exist for breaking line of sight under fire, and their default binds are also rebindable in Settings.
Gadgets buy you space. item:smoke-grenades cut enemy sightlines so you can cross open ground or revive a teammate. The zipline throws you onto rooftops or across gaps that pursuers cannot follow quickly. One more detail that saves runs: you can still reach an extraction while downed, and even while downed you can call elevators and close doors behind you. Anything you extract lands in your inventory intact. For the full rules on downs, ziplines, and exit timing, see our extraction mechanics guide.
Against the ARC machines, aim, do not spray. Each enemy type has a soft spot. The item:bastion exposes yellow knee guards and rear cylinders during its reload animation, so hold fire and punish that window instead of plinking its armor plate. The general rule across every ARC: break legs or hit the exposed core rather than dumping a magazine into the armored shell.
Reading the map and routing your extraction
Maps sort loot and danger into three colors. White zones carry scarce, basic loot and the lowest risk, which makes them the right place to learn. Orange zones hold higher-value loot patrolled by ARC machines. Red zones have the best loot in the game and the heaviest guard. Match the zone to your confidence and what you can afford to lose that run.
Your extraction choice matters as much as your loot route. The nearest exit is the one everyone else is also sprinting toward, which makes it the easy place to get camped. When you are carrying something worth keeping, take the longer path to a quieter extraction. A few extra seconds of walking beats handing your run to a player sitting on the obvious exit.
Loadout literacy: ammo, augments, and shields
Ammo comes in three weights. Light is cheap to run but struggles against armor. Medium is the workhorse. Heavy punches through armor and is what you want against the tougher armored ARCs. Carry ammo that matches the threat instead of forcing one type into every fight.
The Augment is the keystone of any loadout. It gates your Safe Pocket access, your backpack space, your carry weight, your quick-use slots, and which shields you can equip. Pick the Augment first, then build the rest of the kit around it. Shields soak damage before it reaches your health, and the higher-tier shields demand a compatible Augment, which is exactly why the Augment comes first. For which Augment fits your playstyle and which weapons earn their slot, our Best Augment tier list and Best Weapons tier list do the ranking so you do not have to test every option in raid.
Growing your stash between raids
Progression in ARC Raiders happens as much in your workshop as in the field. Scrappy, your between-raid scavenger, passively pulls in materials while you are out of a raid, and leveling him up raises what he brings home. He turns time spent away from the game into a steady trickle of crafting stock.
Vendor quests are your real early engine. Traders like Lance at the Clinic hand out jobs that pay XP, crafting materials, gear, weapons, and schematics. Running quests is the fastest honest way to rebuild a stash after a rough death, so make them your default loop rather than chasing high-risk loot runs you are not ready for. Back at the workshop, feed scrap and ARC parts into the bench to refine them into higher-quality crafting materials instead of letting raw junk pile up.
For your first skill points, lean toward staying alive and staying mobile. item:survivors-stamina and item:used-to-the-weight keep your movement speed up under load. item:marathon-runner, item:youthful-lungs, and item:calming-stroll manage stamina so you can actually run when you need to. item:looters-instincts, item:broad-shoulders, and item:security-breach round out survival and looting, and the Gentle Pressure and Proficient Pryer picks from earlier keep your looting quiet and quick. When you are ready to commit points to a plan, our solo stealth build shows how these survival picks chain into a quiet, self-sufficient kit.
Make friends, not just kills
Here is the lesson that surprises people coming from other extraction shooters: being friendly often pays better than being aggressive. Teaming up with randoms, splitting objectives, and the occasional stranger handing you free gear all happen, and over many raids that goodwill outearns the kills you would have forced. Use emotes to say "do not shoot" or "want to team up," and you can talk your way into a shared extraction with someone who would otherwise have been a threat. Not every encounter has to end in a body. The ones that do not are often the ones that pay.