ARC Raiders Guide: Complete Walkthrough, Tips, Skills & Quest Guides (2026)

ARC Raiders is a new third-person extraction shooter from Embark Studios, the same team that brought you the fast-paced FPS The Finals. ARC Raiders was actually intended to be Embark's debut game before the team decided to rework it entirely and focus on The Finals first, a bet that seemingly paid off now that ARC Raiders is one of the most popular games on the market today since it arrived in October 2025.

Gameplay Overview

If you've played an extraction shooter before, the core concepts of ARC Raiders will be familiar to you. You jump into a large, expansive map, scavenge for resources and materials, raid and take down enemy players, and extract back to Speranza, the underground city you and every other raider call home.

Beyond enemy players, you'll also have to be wary of ARCs, the hostile machines that are the cause of the dystopian nature of the world. There are several different kinds of ARCs, and you can find out more about them below in the 'Know Your ARCs' section.

You can also find out more about ARCs and the gameplay in ARC Raiders in our Tips and Tricks Guide and our First 5 Things to Do for New Raiders Guide, and our Most Annoying ARCs - And How to Deal With Them guides.

ARC Raiders Beginner Guide: Getting Started

When you first log into ARC Raiders, you'll go through a short tutorial that shows you a couple of gameplay basics, like how to move, shoot, breach doors, and search for resources. It's all very basic and seems to end very abruptly with one major lesson: you have to be aware of other Raiders. You learn this lesson when two unknown Raiders catch you by surprise, though, unlike in a regular match, because this is just the tutorial, you wake up after the screen fades to black and fades back in, and the tutorial continues.

From there, you continue until you reach an exit elevator and make your first trip to Speranza, the underground city that becomes your home. You'll be given what looks like a storage closet as your place to live, which you'll slowly build out into your ultimate post-apocalyptic home, and meet the first of the vendors you'll get quests and buy resources from.

You can find out more about what to know when getting started in our Tips and Tricks Guide, First 5 Things to Do for New Raiders Guide, and Best Skills in ARC Raiders Guide. We'll also have quest-specific guides coming to help you through some of the more complex tasks, like in our guide for Apollo's The League quest or A First Foothold Quest.

ARC Raiders Skill Tree & Build Guide

Creating the aesthetic of your character is, of course, a key part of the experience in any game. But what's really going to impact you in gameplay is your stats and what you take with you when you go up top.

You don't want to take anything with you that you would really regret losing, and you can't just keep rolling the dice with free loadouts. You need to figure out how to put a build together, particularly with where you put your early stats and what weapons you put stock in.

Find out more about where to spend your skill points and which stats to upgrade in our Best Skills in ARC Raiders Guide.

Speranza Overview

Speranza is your home base of operations in ARC Raiders. It's where you look at and upgrade your Raider's stats, change your loadout, your outfit - it's where you do everything.

You cycle through the main lobby screen, your Workshop, your Raider, the Traders, Decks, and the in-game Store with the left and right bumpers. Your inventory, however, is always available on its own dedicated button. If you don't know what that button is, look to the bottom left of your screen.

When you're in your inventory menu, make sure to pay attention to the 'Actions' button. That's where you'll be able to decide on what to do with everything you find and store in your Stash. You also need to pay close attention to a small 'Expand' option that sits just above your inventory stack. That's where you upgrade your Stash, so it can hold more things.

Find out more about the important elements of Speranza in our First 5 Things to Do and Tips and Tricks Guide.

Going Topside and Coming Home

Of course, you can't upgrade your Raider, your gear, build out your home in Speranza; you can't do anything, if you can't survive a raid. Once you choose where to go, when you arrive you'll have approximately 30 minutes to grab what you can and make it back to an elevator to reach Speranza safely.

Each map will have multiple options for elevators or other ways back home, but they won't all be open to you for the whole match. One will remain available the entire time, but if you want the safest route home, you'll need to make it to an elevator in time.

An in-depth guide on how to buildcraft to survive topside and make it back home will go live soon.

Know Your ARCs

You should always be on the lookout for other players. Even with the reputation ARC Raiders has gained, where plenty of players choose to play a more passive, PvE style, they're technically always a danger. But ARCs, the robots that stalk every inch of the map, those are the biggest danger of all.

That's why it's important to know your enemy; not just how to defeat it, but how to avoid it, and how to ensure you're always making it back home.

For more on how to takedown some of the ARCs you'll face when going Topside, check out our Most Annoying ARCs - and How to Deal With Them guide.

Review

For more on ARC Raiders, you can check out our full review and find out why Wccftech's Kai Tatsumoto gave it a 9/10.

Last updated: February 14, 2026

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.