Arc Raiders Loot Strategy Guide: What to Keep, Sell, and Scrap

Arc Raiders throws a huge variety of loot at you every raid: everyday junk, high-tech ARC components, medical supplies, keys, and rare modules that quietly gate major upgrades. Without a clear plan, it’s easy to sell or recycle an item you desperately need later for a quest, project, or hideout improvement.

This guide is an original, strategic breakdown inspired by community cheat sheets and in-game item usage. It explains how to think about loot categories, which items are worth hoarding, and how to avoid getting stuck because you sold that “useless” object ten hours ago.

• How loot types and rarities work
• General rules for selling, scrapping, and stashing
• Typical items needed for quests and expedition projects
• Common requirements for workshop and hideout upgrades
• Sample loot table to guide your decision-making
• FAQ for quick, practical answers

Understanding Loot in Arc Raiders

Every item you pick up in Arc Raiders falls into a few overlapping categories that dictate its value and how often you’ll need it. Before diving into specific items, it helps to understand the framework the game uses.

Location-Based Loot Families

Items are broadly associated with the type of area where they’re most likely to appear. Knowing this helps you farm specific materials or quest components:

• Arc Sites: High-tech remains of ARC machines and installations. Expect powercells, alloys, circuits, cores, and unique cells from specific enemies (for example, Bastion or Bombardier units).
• Electrical / Technological Areas: Power stations, server rooms, communication towers. These tend to drop batteries, wires, electrical components, and advanced variants used in higher-tier crafting benches.
• Mechanical / Industrial Zones: Workshops, factories, storage depots. You’ll mainly find mechanical components, springs, pumps, motors, and broken devices that can be scrapped into metal parts.
• Residential & Commercial Spaces: Apartments, shops, diners, and old city neighborhoods. These provide everyday clutter: collectibles, food, furniture, toys, and decorative items.
• Medical Areas: Clinics, pharmacies, and hospital ruins. Expect antiseptics, bio-scanners, medical kits, and chemical reagents.
• Nature Environments: Fields, forests, farms, and overgrown outskirts. These yield plants, fruits, seeds, and other organic loot.
• Security Locations: Guard posts, checkpoints, surveillance hubs. Typically contain sensors, cameras, radios, and security hardware.

While many items appear in multiple contexts, this rough mapping lets you target the places most likely to drop what you need.

Rarity and Practical Value

Rarity (Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic) loosely tracks with how critical an item is for progression:

• Common: Abundant junk, basic food, simple components. Usually safe to sell or scrap unless specifically tied to an upgrade or NPC project.
• Uncommon: More specialized or slightly rarer pieces. Many early hideout upgrades and NPC requests use these.
• Rare: High-value materials, advanced modules, keys, and quest-critical medical or technological items. These are often bottlenecks.
• Epic: Unique drops from powerful ARC units or rare containers. Frequently required for top-tier workbenches or late-game projects.

Rarity alone doesn’t determine what to do with an item, but it’s a useful warning that selling or scrapping it casually could hurt your future progression.

Core Loot Decisions: Sell, Scrap, or Stash

Every time you return from a raid you’re basically making three decisions with each item:

• Sell: Convert an item into coins to fund gear, consumables, or services.
• Scrap: Break it down into raw materials like metal parts, rubber, plastic, chemicals, or electronics.
• Stash: Store it for later use in quests, crafting recipes, workshop upgrades, or expedition projects.

When to Sell

Coins are important, but Arc Raiders is more often bottlenecked by specific items than by raw currency. In general, sell items that meet most of these criteria:

• Purely cosmetic or flavor items with no known recipe or upgrade usage.
• Common residential or commercial junk such as ornaments, toys, low-value trinkets.
• Duplicate copies of high-value collectibles once you’re confident you don’t need multiples.

Be careful: some harmless-looking objects (like pillows or pet beds) are actually used in hideout improvement chains, so always check for upgrade references before mass-selling.

When to Scrap

Scrapping shines when you need large amounts of basic materials to craft ammo, armor plates, explosives, or to fulfill upgrade requirements:

• Broken equipment (flashlights, radios, tasers) that dismantle into batteries, wires, metal or sensor components.
• Damaged ARC tech that turns into arc alloy or other rare raw resources.
• Redundant technical objects that have no direct upgrade usage but yield critical base materials.

Given that modern games often emphasize crafting for player customization and long-term progression, maintaining stable stocks of core materials is essential, especially as content evolves over time with patches and expansions.¹

When to Stash

Stashing is where long-term strategy matters. Generally, stash items that:

• Are explicitly required for quests or NPC chains.
• Appear in workbench / station upgrade requirements.
• Are needed for expedition projects or multi-step objectives.
• Are Rare or Epic ARC components whose future use you haven’t unlocked yet.

Rather than memorizing every single item’s purpose, learn to recognize patterns in which families are almost always worth keeping. The sections below group some of the most important categories.

Quest-Critical and Project-Critical Items

Many quests and long-term projects reuse the same small pool of specialized items. These are almost always worth stashing, and in many cases you’ll eventually need several copies.

Medical and Biotech Items

In a setting where medical care is scarce, high-grade medical supplies are naturally valuable. Based on how post-collapse games typically structure their progression, you should expect items like these to be frequently requested:

• Antiseptic: Commonly used to complete early medical-related quests and to upgrade medical labs. It may also appear in recipes for advanced healing or cleansing items.
• Bio-scanner Components (cracked scanners, pods, etc.): Often required for diagnostic or research upgrades in your hideout.
• Medical Kits (even damaged ones): These are prime candidates for medical station upgrades or salvageable components.

The importance of disinfectants and basic medical supplies mirrors real-world disaster planning, where agencies like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlight disinfectants and first-aid kits as essential emergency inventory.²

Power and Electronics

Facilities, weapons, and defensive systems all rely on a web of electrical components. Items to prioritize:

• Basic and Advanced Electrical Components: Widely used across higher-level gear benches, utility stations, and upscaled crafting recipes.
• Batteries and Industrial Batteries: Needed for project milestones, energy-based weapons, and some utility upgrades.
• Sensors, Cameras, Radios: Often have specific use in surveillance or communications-focused projects, and scrap into valuable electronics.
• Power Cables and Powercells (including ARC variants): Essential for powering experimental gear and refining stations.

Electric power and control electronics are fundamental to both real and fictional infrastructures; for instance, the International Energy Agency notes that power systems reliability rests on a broad range of electrical components and storage devices.³

ARC Technology and Enemy Cores

ARC drops are a special class of loot: they gate many mid-to-late-game upgrades.

• ARC Alloy and Burned ARC Circuitry: Core materials for hideout improvements, refiner upgrades, and advanced crafting.
• ARC Circuitry and Motion Cores: Required at multiple refinement levels and for high-end technological stations.
• Special Enemy Cells (for example, Bastion or Bombardier cells): Typically Epic items used to unlock the highest tiers of specific benches.
• Thermal and Coolant Components: Provide insulation or cooling modifiers and are frequently scrapped for fabric, plastic, or chemicals.

Given their importance and relative rarity, these components should almost always be stashed until you confirm you have more than enough for all current upgrades.

Keys, Passes, and Access Cards

Another distinct category includes keys and access cards used to open locked areas or containers:

• Zone-specific keys (village keys, cellar keys, master keys).
• Facility cards (employee access passes, confiscation room keys).
• Quest-related keys earned as rewards or random drops.

These are almost never worth selling or scrapping. Many of them unlock high-value caches, secret shortcuts, or later quests. Always stash them.

Items Used for Hideout and Workshop Upgrades

Your hideout’s stations and workshops are the backbone of your progress. Most station upgrades follow predictable patterns: they start with simple junk and scale into specialized tech and rare ARC drops.

Typical Stations and Their Needs

While exact recipes differ, you can broadly expect the following:

• Scrap / Salvage Specialist: Often wants household items, fabrics, and comfort objects (pillows, pet beds, fruit, and other oddities) for incremental comfort or storage upgrades.
• Gunsmith / Weapons Bench: Demands mechanical parts (tools, gears, springs), weapon-associated items, and advanced mechanical components as you reach higher tiers.
• Medical Lab: Tied to medical kits, antiseptics, bio-scanners, durable cloths, and occasionally ARC biological samples.
• Explosives or Ordnance Station: Uses fuels, chemical reagents, crude explosives, detonator parts, and mechanical triggers.
• Gear Bench: Draws heavily on electrical components, power devices, and rare ARC enemy drops for advanced armor or gadgets.
• Refiner: Requires items that represent raw power and processing capability—motors, toasters, ARC cores, and specialized modules.
• Utility Station: A hybrid station that uses damaged tech, sensors, advanced electronics, and rare power units for mobility and quality-of-life gadgets.

Organic and Comfort Items

Surprisingly, a large number of upgrades hinge on items that look like harmless clutter:

• Fruits and Plants (agave, apricots, prickly pears, olives, mushrooms): Used for comfort upgrades, NPC requests, or environmental projects.
• Pet Items and Furniture (cat beds, pillows, decorative pieces): These may be tied to character-focused upgrade chains and hideout aesthetics.
• Seeds: Often linked to farming or environmental restoration projects, and to specific NPCs who manage food or greenery.

Games that include base-building or settlement development frequently use these items to reflect improvements in living standards, a theme that echoes research on how environmental quality and comfort affect human well-being and performance.⁴

Sample Loot Table: How to Decide on the Fly

The real game contains a large list of items, but you can use a decision pattern rather than memorizing everything. The table below offers a sample of typical item types and a recommended approach.

Practical Loot Management Tips

Even with a good mental model, it’s easy to get overwhelmed once your stash fills up. These practices help you keep a clean, useful inventory.

1. Reserve Space for Rare Tech and Medical Items

Make it a habit to always keep some stash capacity for Rare and Epic ARC components and medical supplies. If your storage is full of low-impact junk, you’ll either stop picking up rare drops or start making rushed decisions you’ll regret later.

2. Use Checklists for Upgrades and Projects

Before a raid, quickly review what your next few upgrades or expedition phases require. That way you can prioritize specific location types. For instance, if you need motion cores and circuit boards, focus on ARC sites and industrial complexes rather than looting every apartment block you see.

3. Scrap Before You Sell

If an item has no known usage, ask yourself whether the raw materials it yields are more valuable than the coins you’d get from selling it. Many mechanical and electronic items provide better long-term value when scrapped.

4. Keep at Least a Few of Everything Uncommon

Until you learn the full scope of upgrade recipes, a smart rule of thumb is:

• Keep at least 3–5 copies of any Uncommon item.
• Keep all Rare and Epic items unless you have a clear surplus.
• Sell or scrap extra commons liberally.

5. Reevaluate After Major Unlocks

Whenever you unlock a new station tier or a fresh category of expedition projects, revisit your stash. Items that used to be “junk” may suddenly appear in recipes. Once you confirm which objects remain unused, you can safely convert them into coins or materials.

FAQs: Arc Raiders Loot and Item Management

Do I ever need multiple copies of the same rare item?

Yes. Many quests and projects reuse the same rare items. It’s common for players to need several units of similar components across different upgrade paths. To avoid shortages, assume you’ll eventually want multiple copies of any Rare ARC tech or specialized medical item.

Is it safe to sell decorative or collectible items?

Mostly, but not always. Some decorative objects are purely for profit, while others quietly feed into hideout comfort or NPC-specific upgrades. Until you know which is which, store at least one copy of any Uncommon or Rare decorative item; sell duplicates once you’re sure they’re not required by recipes.

Should I hoard all keys and access cards?

Absolutely. Keys, passes, and access cards are almost never junk. They tend to unlock high-value rooms, chests, or quest paths. Keep them in your stash permanently; their weight is negligible compared to the potential rewards.

What’s better: coins or raw materials?

In the early game, coins feel valuable because they unlock immediate gear and consumables. As you progress, specific materials become harder to replace than money. In general, scrap mechanical and electronic junk for materials and sell only those items that don’t break down into components you need.

How do I know if an item is needed for a station upgrade?

Regularly check each station’s upgrade screen and make note of the required items. Many players jot down a short list or keep a digital note. Over time, you’ll recognize which item families are repeatedly requested by the same station (for example, advanced electronics for the utility station, mechanical parts for the gunsmith).