ARC Raiders Tips and Tricks – What You Need to Know Before You Start Raiding

Embark Studio's new third-person shooter, ARC Raiders, isn't the typical third-person cover shooter you might remember from peak Xbox 360/PS3-era games. It's an extraction shooter, which means it's as much about the looting as it is about the shooting, but above all, it's about surviving.

You can fill your backpack with as much high-tier loot as it can carry, but it'll be all for naught if you can't make it back to your home base in Speranza alive. After playing for over a dozen hours (and climbing), there are a few things I wish I knew before I started raiding the surface of Calabretta.

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

ARC Raiders Tips and Tricks - What You Need to Know Before You Start Raiding

Track Everything

Even when you're just starting out, going to the surface on your first quests, fighting new ARCs for the first time to try and get some high-tier loot, it can all feel a bit aimless if you're just filling your backpack with the first things you find.

You only have so many slots to take things home with you, and only one of those slots is your Safe Pocket, where you can place one kind of item to make sure it comes home with you. If you're just grabbing the first things you find as you search the various cabinets, boxes, broken-down ARCs, and any nook and cranny where loot can be found, you'll fill your precious slots faster than you'll realize.

That leaves you stuck in your inventory menu, managing items either by dropping them or swapping them out with an item you found you actually need, and now every breach and search you perform gets bogged down and wastes time, time you may have needed to make it to an elevator or hatch to make it back to Speranza safely. Not to mention the fact that you're leaving yourself vulnerable to other Raiders while stuck in menus.

Take a few minutes before you jump into your next raid, figure out what upgrades you want next, and track their resources. Only grab items that have a marker in the top-right corner of their box, indicating it's something you actually need for an upgrade you want. You'll have better, more efficient raids, and upgrade your gear far faster than if you grab everything you see.

Rely on Yourself Before Traders

When you start ARC Raiders, you'll meet five traders: Celeste, Shani, Tian Wen, Lance, and Apollo. They'll each give you quests to complete as you dig further into the game, but they'll also sell you supplies across different categories, like Security, Guns, Grenades and Gadgets, and Health Items.

If you're having trouble holding on to resources and have the cash, then feel free to buy what you need from them, but, realistically, you'll likely never really need to use their shops. Or at least, once you build a Refiner for your workshop, you should be able to break down what you find up top into crafting materials you need, and craft what you're looking for at your Workbench. The money you acquire from selling any loot is still useful to have for a rainy day, but it's a far better use of your cash to expand the limit of your Stash before spending it all on items that you can craft yourself, especially in your earlier hours.

Your Experience Will be as Chill as You Want it to Be

There's a lot to be said about how multiplayer games with a PvP aspect should handle matchmaking. I won't get into the meat of it here, but for my money, the way Embark handles matchmaking, at least in my experience, is the way to do it. The team employs aggression-based matchmaking, which means you'll get matched up with more PvP-minded players the more you play with a PvP mindset.

But if you're not shooting at other players, if you're just greeting them with a friendly 'hello' and looting alongside them peacefully, then you'll keep getting matched with players of that ilk. ARCs are dangerous enough, and ARC Raiders is arguably a better experience when focusing on the common robot enemy, instead of your fellow Raider, who is just trying to survive.

Of course, it's not fool-proof, even when you go in Solo, which is usually where you'll get a better chance of finding other passive players. But if you want to try and make your looting experience a little safer, strong use of the "Don't Shoot!" emote can go a long way.

Being Successfully Sneaky is More Audio Than Visual

This isn't to say that you should walk into the sightlines of every ARC and potential enemy Raider you come across because you think you'll be far enough away that they won't see you. Maybe that'll be the case with an opposing player, but an ARC can still spot you from a certain degree of distance.

That said, the thing to focus on more than anything is how loud you're being when you're topside. You'll draw attention to yourself faster the louder you are, which is why you'll want to be as quiet as you can when up top. On the flip side, you also want to be quiet because it gives you more opportunity to listen closely for other Raiders.

As far as the actual sightlines for ARCs, though, often all you need to do is hide in some bushes to avoid their ire. It's not foolproof, and if you're hurt while trying to hide, your character won't be able to audibly hide the pain, and you'll draw attention to yourself, but it's often all you have to do. There's a serious lack of available cover Topisde, and you should try to keep an eye open for any hidey-holes to duck into if you suddenly find yourself in a fight.

Don't Lose Track of Time

When you jump into a session, you're immediately met with a countdown at the top of your screen. It's telling you how much time is left before all the elevators on that map close, and you're left with having to find a Raider Hatch to make it back home.

Obvious as it may seem, you really cannot lose track of time. Particularly when you're in your early hours, if you start seeing you're getting to 10 minutes or less to get to an elevator, you should make getting to an elevator your only priority. If you're not paying attention to the map, then you're probably not aware of which elevators have already closed and which ones remain open. Your stamina only goes so far, so hoofing it across the map will take you more time than you think, and you can easily find yourself stuck Topside.

Plus, you don't always know what you're going to run into as you try to make the cross to an elevator, if you're not already near one. Losing track of time is the easiest mistake you can make while Topside, and you don't want to make getting home tougher than it already is.

NOTE: Guide based on 15+ hours of playtime in the PlayStation 5 up-to-date version as of January 23. Screenshots from the same version.

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