ARC Raiders – First 5 Things to Do for New Raiders

ARC Raiders is the hot new extraction shooter on the market from developer Embark Studios, and while it may appear to be another third-person shooter that you can jump into without missing a beat, the fact that it's an extraction shooter means that there's a lot you have to contend with that you don't in your average multiplayer shooter experience.

You can find out more about what to know going into the experience in our Tips and Tricks guide, while this guide will take you through five things you need to do first when starting your own raiding journey in the Rust Belt.

For more guides on ARC Raiders, check out our complete walkthrough and guides hub.

ARC Raiders - First 5 Things to Do for New Raiders

Expand Your Stash

Your loot is everything in ARC Raiders. You need resources to survive, whether it's for directly crafting survival materials like healing items or more weapons and ammo to protect yourself while on raids, or for expanding your workshop back in Speranza, so you can craft better gear to help you go out on raids.

Where that cycle of going out, collecting resources, and successfully extracting back from the Rust Belt breaks down is when you run out of room in your Stash. You take a backpack out with you on raids, but when you get back to Speranza, everything not in your loadout or in your backpack goes to your Stash, which is by no means an unlimited resource. You will run out of space if you're not properly managing your Stash in between raids, but what's better than having to manage it after every raid for five to ten minutes? Expanding it so you have more space and don't have to pause after every run to sell off or recycle a bunch of items because you can no longer store them.

Expanding your Stash is done by collecting in-game Coins, and it's about the most useful thing you can spend those coins on. When you're in Speranza, you can expand your Stash by selecting the 'Expand' button in the top left corner. Your Coins are almost always better put to use by expanding your stash over buying a new weapon or piece of gear from one of the Traders, so try to save up for the expansion costs (which can get fairly hefty) by selling anything you don't need.

Fill Out Your Workshop (Starting with the Gunsmith)

Your Workshop starts out with six empty slots for you to fill with several different benches to craft specific kinds of gear. Alongside the introductory Workbench, you can fill out your Workshop with a Gunsmith, Gear Bench, Refiner, Utility Station, Medical Lab, and an Explosives Station.

All of these stations are important, and you should fill out your Workshop with all of them as soon as you can, and once you've crafted them, track all the resources needed to craft their level two variants. But you should start with the Gunsmith, for the basic reason being the sooner you can upgrade your weapons, the better your chances of survival should you get into a fight while Topside.

After you have your Gunsmith, one of the following three: Medical Lab, Explosives Station, and Utility Station, should be your next focus. The Medical Lab and Utility Station are a little more obvious in their importance because they allow you to craft things like healing items and additional shields, but you will want to prioritize the Explosives Station as well. That's because outside of your main weapons, grenades are your best offensive option against ARCs - particularly the bigger monstrosities.

Go for Some Recon Runs

Part of the fun in ARC Raiders is the tension felt when you barely make it back to Speranza alive, not just with the loot you've grabbed while Topside, but the weapons and resources you brought with you that would have been devastating to lose. That's why you should never take anything with you Topside that you can't afford to lose, and that's also why you should give yourself a bit of a break from the tension and utilize Free Loadouts as often as you can.

Free Loadouts are a randomized inventory and loadout that you can utilize when going Topside. You only get one weapon, a bit of ammo, and your backpack has fewer item slots, meaning you can't take as much back with you. But you don't risk anything in the process either, and when you extract safely, not only do you gain everything that came with that free loadout, but a full session's worth of game knowledge you didn't have before.

That's why I'm calling them 'Recon Runs.' Of course, it's good to get a bunch of loot without having to risk any of your own, but the most important thing you can do on a free loadout run is go to a part of the map you've never been before, and explore it as much as you can. You don't risk your own gear, and you gain invaluable knowledge as a new player still exploring and discovering each of the game's maps.

Unlock Skills Before Upgrading Them

When looking at the Skill Tree in ARC Raiders, you may notice that on each branch, Conditioning, Survival, and Mobility, every point can be upgraded from one to five. You unlock Skill Points with each new level gained, and while you can, of course, bank five skill points early into a single Skill in order to max it out, you're better off spending those skills elsewhere.

Namely, towards unlocking new skills. Each branch starts with one featured Skill, indicated by its larger icon, followed by four smaller skills before the next featured Skill. The second row of featured Skills requires you to spend a certain number of skill points in that particular branch to even be able to unlock them, which is why you're better off using your early skill points to unlock all five of the skills available at the start of each branch.

Once you've unlocked all of the skills initially available to you, feel free to start banking skill points towards unlocking higher tiers for the different skills. Otherwise, you're just making it harder on yourself and unnecessarily gatekeeping yourself from essential skills like being able to craft items while Topside and increases to your base Stamina.

Kill ARCs, Make Friends with Raiders

This might not be everyone's preferred approach when starting ARC Raiders - it is, after all, a PvPvE game - but this whole guide is about what to do first when jumping into Embark's new extraction shooter, and this means taking into consideration the studio's aggression-based matchmaking.

Of course, you can choose not to do that. Out of the rest of this list, this is the one you can choose to ignore based on playstyle preference. The other elements are sound advice for ARC Raiders, and while I think this is also sound advice, I can understand if you're not coming to this game for the PvE.

The beauty of ARC Raiders isn't just that it has both PvE and PvP; it's that the community has embraced both almost as separate matchmaking queues. You can play one version of ARC Raiders for hours and then flip over to a very different version just by playing differently. It's wonderful to have both in this capacity, but the game's extraction shooter nature is what makes me express caution towards diving into PvP.

You don't want to find yourself in a frustrating loop of being unable to make real progress because you keep getting killed by other players. Also, the reality is that if you start off your ARC Raiders journey with a full PvP focus, then you're in for a rougher start. You just simply won't be as prepared to take down enemy Raiders, and while you can rely on your squadmates to help carry you, anyone who has played a squad-based multiplayer PvP game knows that relying on your squad, particularly if you're playing with strangers, is rarely a good strategy.

So spend your early hours as a PvE player. Load up your stash, craft some stronger weapons, level up and gain as much game knowledge as you want. Then go into PvP with both barrels, and you'll likely have a much better time.

NOTE: Guide based on 15+ hours of playtime in the PlayStation 5 up-to-date version as of January 27. Screenshots from same version.

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