Arc Raiders is a third-person extraction shooter from the developer of The Finals in which you spawn on the surface of a ruined Earth, scavenge for 30 to 40 minutes, and try to get your loot back to the underground base of Speranza. The free Frozen Trail update landed on October 8, 2026, added a new snowy map, a Spider-Man-style grappling hook and 22 quests, and pushed the Steam player count to a new 7-month high (GameRant; GamingBible). This guide covers the basics for your first five raids and every meaningful change in the 2.0 update.
The 60-second version: what Arc Raiders is
Extraction shooter is a genre where you take gear into a map, fight enemies and other players, and have to extract with whatever you pick up before you die and lose it all. Arc Raiders is a third-person take on the genre from the studio that made The Finals, released on October 30, 2025 for PS5, Windows and Xbox Series X|S at $40 (Wikipedia; Steam store page). Critics gave it an 86 on Metacritic for PC and 88 on Xbox Series X|S, and The Game Awards 2025 named it Best Multiplayer Game (Wikipedia).
You can play solo, in a duo, or in a trio. Solo players get matched against other solo players by default, so the early raids are usually fair fights rather than 3v1 ganks.
How a raid works (the loop)
Every match follows the same shape:
- Spawn in Speranza. Drop into your stash, pick what to take with you from your safe pocket, and queue.
- Go Topside. You exit through an airlock onto the planet’s surface. The map you load into is shared with up to a few dozen other players in your matchmaking pool.
- Scavenge for 30 minutes (or 40 on a few map conditions like Hidden Bunker and Locked Gate). You loot containers, downed ARC machines (the hostile robots that gave the game its name) and other players’ leftovers.
- Extract. Leave via extraction elevators, metro stations, air shafts, or raider hatches (safer exits that cost a key). If you die, you lose everything you were carrying except what was in your safe pocket.
- Spend the haul. Back in Speranza, sell to vendors, buy and craft weapons and gear, upgrade perks, and run quests for the various faction NPCs.
That loop is the whole game. The skill ceiling is in steps 3 and 4: knowing when to push, when to hide, and which extraction is safe.
Surviving your first 5 raids
- Take almost nothing in. Your first matches are about learning routes and extraction points. If you die, you lose nothing real. Players who bring their best kit on day one lose it to a stray ARC and feel bad for a week.
- Use the safe pocket. Anything in your safe pocket survives death. Treat it as your bank; only the loot you stuff in your backpack is at risk.
- Listen before you fight. ARC machines telegraph hard. Audio cues give you a few seconds to flank or run. Headphones help more than any gun.
- Learn two extraction points per map. If you hear a third party at one extractor, you can rotate to another without burning your raid.
- Vendor early, vendor often. Most early-game loot is worth more to a vendor than to you. Selling junk to buy better ammo and meds is the fastest gear progression in the game.
- Run vendor quests. Each NPC offers short, repeatable quests. The rewards are designed to be your next tier of gear; following them in order is faster than wandering.
When to fight and when to run
Arc Raiders is PvPvE, meaning every other player is a potential enemy but not a guaranteed one. Some of the best players in the game never fire a shot at a human. The default play is to take fights only when you have a clear advantage: better position, the jump on someone, or a guaranteed extraction after the kill. If you don’t have one of those, disengaging is the correct move.
ARC machines are predictable but punishing. Most are solo-able at your level if you kite, and a few are designed to be avoided or baited into another squad. Calling out an ARC patrol to nearby humans is a valid tactic: they fight it, you loot the result, you both walk away.
What’s in the Frozen Trail update (the Oct 8 patch)
The Frozen Trail update is officially just “the Frozen Trail update“, but players are calling it Arc Raiders 2.0 because of how much is in it (GamingBible). The studio calls it the largest update since launch.
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
| Pendola Pass | A new snow-covered mountain map. Conditions are harsher than the existing maps and routes are tighter. |
| Grappling Hook | A new traversal tool that lets you swing across gaps and climb to high ground. The community is comparing it to Spider-Man. |
| New ARC enemies | Patrols and elites that only appear on Pendola Pass and rotating into other maps. |
| New weapons and tools | Multiple new weapon archetypes and utility items, including the loadout gadget hook. |
| Outpost and Research Bench | A new permanent base-building tier in Speranza for crafting and research projects. |
| 22 new quests | Vendor and faction quest lines tied to Pendola Pass and the new gear. |
| Revamped Skill Tree | A rebuild of the perk and skill progression system. |
| New Reward Pass | A free seasonal pass that runs alongside the major update. |
Sources: GameRant; Frozen Trail Launch Trailer, PlayStation channel.
The update is free for all owners and ran alongside a free weekend from October 8 to 12 across PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, which is one reason the player count spiked so hard (GameRant).
The numbers: how big the comeback is
- Steam 24h peak after Frozen Trail: 185,443 concurrent players on October 8, 2026 (GameRant; GamingBible).
- September baseline: 39,900 peak, around 21,000 average, with reports of a ~10,000 low (GameRant; GamingBible).
- Swing: roughly 4.6x September’s high and the strongest showing since March 2026.
- All-time Steam peak: 481,966 concurrent in January 2026, per SteamDB as cited by GameRant.
- Lifetime sales: 14 million copies worldwide by February 2026, per the developer’s figure cited in Wikipedia.
Our player-counts page tracks Arc Raiders’ daily Steam peak as part of our weekly series.
What’s next: the bi-annual roadmap
In May 2026, the developer announced a move from monthly major updates to a bi-annual schedule, arguing the faster pace wasn’t sustainable and left no room for meaningful changes (Wikipedia; GameRant). Frozen Trail is the first major release under that new cadence. That means the next major content drop is likely around April 2027, with a smaller mid-season patch or event likely around January. The studio hasn’t published a public roadmap beyond that, so the safe assumption is: one big free update every six months, with smaller events and balance passes between.
Should you start now?
Our read: Yes, if you have an evening to spare before Monday October 13, 2026, because the free weekend ends that day. After that, Frozen Trail’s content is a permanent addition for anyone who owns the $40 base game, so there’s no FOMO penalty for waiting, but the population spike is real, and playing in a packed server is the easiest way to see why players are calling the update “one of the best in any game, ever” (GamingBible). If you bounced off Arc Raiders at launch because the extraction loop felt punishing, the grappling hook and the new Pendola Pass map are the two changes most likely to change your mind: traversal feels better, and a fresh map means nobody has a thousand-hour head start on routes. If you bounced off because the genre isn’t for you, the bi-annual cadence means you’re not committing to a live-service treadmill. The next patch is six months out, and the current content is meant to last until then.
For more on the player-count jump, see our Arc Raiders player-count story. Every October release is on the Release Calendar.
Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report
Comments
Loading comments…