A first raid begins long before the launch button. The loop that ARC Raiders is built around has two halves, and only one of them is on the map. The half that happens in Speranza — buying, crafting, repairing, choosing a loadout, deciding which quest to chase — is where the raid is actually shaped. The half topside is where that shape either holds or collapses.
Understanding the loop is the first thing worth doing, because almost every beginner mistake is a mistake about sequencing rather than about shooting. A raider who understands the loop knows why they are carrying what they are carrying. A raider who does not is carrying whatever looked good in the menu and hoping the raid explains itself.
The two halves of the loop
The official framing is simple: prepare a loadout, go topside, spend a stretch of time scavenging a surface, and attempt to extract with what you found. Between rounds you take those resources back into the hub, where they become workbench upgrades, crafted gear, purchased items and skill tree progress. Then the cycle repeats with a slightly better kit than last time.
The important word in that description is “between”. The hub phase is not a menu you click through before the real game starts. It is a phase of the game with its own decisions, and the decisions there determine what is possible on the next launch. A raider who treats the hub as admin will keep launching with the same kit and keep getting the same result.
Speranza: what actually needs deciding
Before the first launch, four things in the hub matter: the loadout, the quest board, the workbench, and the skill tree. They are not equal in urgency, and getting the order wrong is what makes a first hour feel chaotic.
The quest board comes first because it tells you what the raid is for. A raid with a named objective behaves differently from a raid with no objective: you have a destination, which means the route has a shape, which means decisions about where to go are already made. A raid without an objective becomes a wander, and wandering is how new players end up in the middle of a firefight they did not choose.
The workbench comes second because it gates crafting. Every upgrade there widens what you can make, and what you can make determines what a loadout can be. A raider who upgrades the workbench early can bring a purpose-built kit; a raider who does not is stuck with whatever the shop sells.
The skill tree comes last in the early game, and this is counterintuitive enough to be worth stating plainly. The early points are cheap and the choices only become load-bearing once you know which situations you actually end up in. Spending them early is not fatal, but spending them deliberately later is better, because by then you know whether you need the branch that helps you escape or the branch that helps you carry.
The loadout decision, in plain terms
A first loadout should be cheap, light, and specific. Cheap because the first raids are for learning and a lost expensive kit teaches nothing extra. Light because weight is a combat statistic — a heavy pack makes you slow, and slow makes you take fights you would otherwise avoid. Specific because a kit built for one job does that job better than a kit built for three.
The specific job for a first raid is usually “reach the objective and come back”. That means one weapon you can afford to lose, ammunition for perhaps two engagements, one healing item, and one traversal tool. The Grappling Hook earns its place in that list because it turns vertical geometry into a route instead of a wall, and the 2.1.0 update specifically made vaulting onto ledges and roofs easier with it, including more reliable auto-vault at the top of rope climbs.
What should not be in that list is anything you would be upset to lose. That is the whole rule, and every other consideration is downstream of it. If losing the kit would change how you play the next raid, the kit is too expensive for a learning run.
Landing: the decision nobody thinks about
The insertion point decides the first two minutes, and the first two minutes decide a surprising amount of the rest. Landing on the dense side of a surface means meeting other raiders immediately, while everyone is still fresh and everyone is still heading for the same containers. Landing on the sparse side means a slower start and a longer walk, and the walk is where the map gets learned.
For a first hour, take the sparse side every time. It is not the efficient choice; it is the informative one. The sparse approach gives you time to notice which containers are where, which sightline an ARC unit holds, and where your own footsteps are audible. That knowledge is what later makes the dense side survivable.
Topsides: reading the first few minutes
The first minute on the surface is about listening rather than moving. Gunfire in the distance tells you where someone else is, which is useful, and it also tells them nothing about you. The asymmetry is the point: a raider who spends the first minute listening knows more than a raider who spends it sprinting toward the nearest building.
The second thing to read is the airspace. Flying ARC units do not need line of sight to find a raider — a single one overhead functions as a timer, holding position and marking a location for the ground units. That changes the priority order: getting out of the open matters more than the kill, because the kill does not stop the mark from having been made.
The third thing is your own noise. Walking instead of sprinting is slower and safer, and the trade is not close in a learning raid. A sprint across open ground tells every player within earshot not just where you are but where you are going, and where you are going is the more valuable of the two facts.
Looting: the question to ask at every container
The looting instinct is to pick up everything that looks valuable and sort it out later, and the instinct is wrong because “later” is a walk through a map with other people on it. The question to ask at each container is not “is this good?” but “is this better per slot than the worst thing I am carrying?”.
That single question removes most of the time a new raider spends standing still in the open. It also handles rarity automatically: a high-rarity item that fills half the pack can be worth less per slot than a stack of something ordinary. Value per slot, not colour, is the number that matters.
The related discipline is to leave one or two slots permanently empty. Not because you expect to find something better, but because an empty slot is what lets you take the opportunity when it appears without stopping to repack in the open. A full pack is not a success state; it is a weight penalty and a decision already made badly.
The extraction decision
Extraction is the only part of a raid that cannot be skipped, and it is where most kits are lost. The reason is structural: an extraction point is a known location that every other player can also find, so holding it means occupying the one spot where anyone who wants to leave has to come.
The rule that follows is to decide the extraction before you are within sight of it, and then either take it or stay away from it. Hovering — approaching, backing off, approaching again — is the worst of the three, because it spends the time and still ends up predictable.
The 2.1.0 update removed one specific way to die at an extraction: players could be eliminated despite being inside the Gondola and extracting. That fix matters, and it matters more than it sounds like it should, because it removes a death that taught players to distrust the extraction itself rather than the situation around it. It did not remove the situation. The gondola is still visible and still approachable from several angles.
What the second raid should be
The second raid should be the same route again, with the same cheap kit, aiming to complete one more step of the same objective. Not a new surface, not a new weapon, not a new plan. Repetition is what converts a route from a set of instructions into knowledge, and knowledge is the only thing that survives losing a kit.
Somewhere around the fifth or sixth successful run the route stops requiring decisions, and the raid starts to feel easier. It has not become easier. What has happened is that navigation stopped consuming attention, and the attention became available for everything else — listening, watching, and choosing when not to fight. That is what the first hour is actually teaching.