GOING TOPSIDE! An unsolicited ARC Raider’s Bare Bones Beginners Guide for New Recruits.

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Welcome to all our new raiders. If you are looking for dinosaurs, that’s the other Ark game. Fedora wearing adventures, big boats full of animals, boardgames about zoos, and if you are Lost, those are all other classes that you can find in our directory (I was gonna run this joke all the way out, but seriously, type “ark” into steam, it’s a thousand words by itself).

This is a BARE BONES guide, so lets make it quick.

Some notes on fighting ARC
-all ARC are bad, all humans are players
-all ARC have weak spots: they are not covered in black armor
-all ARC have a learnable attack pattern
-little droney boys difficulty can be calculated x=n^2+1, with x being difficulty and n being number of droney boys.
-big droney boy’s difficulty is too high to calculate with modern mathematics
-spider boy is called a leaper. He leaps. don’t be goomba.
- little spider boys are ticks- only easy ARC
- big fat spider boys very strong, have big pew pews (avoid)


Other Raiders - you can’t spell PvPvE without PvP
In solos- 95% are friendly, use emote wheel or prox chat to say hi, or “don’t shoot!” usually works. Hold G for emote wheel, hold B for prox chat. In duos/trios 95% are savage animals- don’t be afraid to put them down. For the good of Speranza.

Rats-
Rats are filthy campers, specifically those who hide near an extract and ambush those trying to leave. Rats should be murdered and humiliated. Don’t be a rat. Seriously, we can’t be friends if you rat people.

utility - the game has many non-damaging utility items: noise makers, door jambs, ziplines, smoke grenades. These are useful and most PvPers are running free kits and don’t expect or necessarily know how to deal with smartly deployed utility. Try to think of ways to use utility to level the playing field if you are ambushed.

Getting Knocked Out- you will lose fights with ARC and players. The gray/common items are plenty viable, with the rarest items being marginally better but usually balanced to excel at a speciality. Go lose your stuff, you’ll find more.

Extract- two notes on getting out: 1) if you got good stuff in your bags, or they are full, don’t be afraid to extract early. Even if it’s five minutes in. Getting back into a match is quick. Do this especially if you get a spawn far away from whatever objective you were working towards. 2) you can still extract and operate doors, and the extract console if you are down but not out. Players will probably finish you off, but ARC loses aggro when you go down. So getting knocked by ARC at the exfil isn’t the end.

Finally, the quests don’t hold your hand a lot- you’ll get an objective but little guidance on how to do it. Look for the geographical POI on the map, then look for environmental clues, like footprints, etc. Somethings are vague in the description to the point of being obtuse. There are youtube videos for every quest if you are in a big hurry.

On a side note, a couple times I’ve gone 20 raids in a row without encountering PVP. Then I’ll log on the next day and be killed four raids in a row. And nearly all instigators of PVP use ambushes, so it’ll often feel unfair. I keep a smoke grenade handy at all times. Just don’t be precious about your gear and go again.

I tried to keep the guide minimalist because discovery in the game is meaningful and satisfying.