ARC Raiders is a multiplayer extraction shooter by Embark Studios, released on October 30, 2025, set on a far-future Earth where machines called ARC fell from the sky and drove people underground. You play a Raider from Speranza, an underground home to thousands, who goes Topside to scavenge what the city needs while dodging ARC and rival Raiders. The story is told through the world itself, in trader quests, the history of each place and the people of Speranza, and it is still unfolding. Ladeeda Worlds explains the ARC Raiders lore so far and asks how long you would last up there.
Guide
In ARC Raiders, Earth is said to have been wrecked many generations ago by floods, fires and earthquakes (the Collapse), and a few survivors reportedly escaped into space on the Exodus shuttles.
Guide
No, ARC Raiders does not have a story mode or a single-player campaign.
Guide
In ARC Raiders, the ARC are hostile machines that started falling from the sky over the Rust Belt at the end of the Sunrise era, wrecked the settlements people had rebuilt and, in a second wave, drove the survivors underground.
The story so far starts long before your first trip Topside. It’s said that, generations ago, floods, fires and earthquakes brought on the Collapse. The few who were left slowly rebuilt in an era remembered as Sunrise, until the machines began falling out of the sky. It took Raiders more than ten years to beat that First Wave, and they were settlers from around an old dam who had taken up arms; the Battle of Victory Ridge finally cleared ARC from the Rust Belt. A few years later a stronger Second Wave came, people retreated below ground, and the city of Toledo took shape there. Today Speranza, led by Celeste, is safer from ARC than most of the Rust Belt, and Celeste fears it won’t last. Where the machines came from, and what they want, nobody can say yet.
The guides here start with what people ask first: is there a story, what is it, and what are the ARC? Every page gives a short answer up top, keeps what the game shows apart from what fans theorise, dates its checks because the game is still changing, and lists the sources used. The first video, Why It Sucks To Be an ARC Raider, is on the way: until it’s out, each guide shows when to expect it.
Lore reference: Arc Raiders Wiki on Fandom (text by Fandom contributors, CC BY-SA).