Speaking of skills, one of the most useful skills in ARC Raiders Items is the In-Round Crafting skill in the Survival branch of the tree. It’s pretty early on in the tree, so it doesn’t take a lot of points to acquire if you aren’t planning on speccing into the Survival branch, but it’s essential for increasing your survivability mid-match.

The skill lets you craft a small handful of items using materials in your backpack while you’re out looting. It’s really helpful because it means if you’ve lost your shield in a firefight but realize that you have all the necessary materials to make a shield recharge kit – or at the very least know where you might be able to find those resources – you’re not completely out of luck. It also lets you consolidate space by combining items you would just use to craft after the match anyway.

Free Loadouts are a reliable tool to lean on if you’re worried about losing high-quality gear in your stash before taking on a risky run. Free Loadouts let you go topside in search of loot with a random assortment of gear that, if you extract, you get to keep. In addition to the free gear, extracting successfully using a Free Loadout also gives you a Free Loadout Augment that can be traded at the Clinic with Lance for one of the three uncommon loadout augments : combat, looting, or tactical.

If you’re having trouble getting down Arc Raiders’ mechanics, Free Loadouts are a great way to build up some skill while risking very little. Plus, trading the augment in for a real, useful augment is a great way to set you in the right direction if you’re having difficulty building momentum.

Like many online shooters, Arc Raiders gives players a contextual ping that lets you mark items, structures, and enemies. While the ping is useful for communication, the thing I use it for most often is identifying what kind of ARC I’m dealing with. Because so many of the ARCs look similar, it can be difficult to tell at a glance if the flying machine making a beeline toward you is a relatively weak Wasp, a beefier Hornet, or a flying killing machine Rocketeer.

Additionally, many of the buy ARC Raiders Items have names that tell you something about their abilities, so if you’ve never encountered a Leaper before, but you ping it and hear that it’s called a “Leaper,” you should have a decent idea of what it’s capable of.