ARC Raiders Story Explained: The Whole Timeline So Far

What is the ARC Raiders story?

ARC Raiders is the story of the people who stayed behind on a broken Earth. Many generations ago, it’s said, floods, fires and earthquakes all but ended civilisation, and a lucky few are said to have escaped into space. The survivors left on the ground were just starting to recover when machines called ARC began dropping out of the sky. After two waves of ARC attacks, people survive in communities underground, and you play a Raider: one of the people from the underground settlement of Speranza who go up to the surface, “topside”, to scavenge what the city needs.

There’s no campaign. The lore comes through the traders’ quests (with the occasional cinematic), the histories of each map and the characters’ backgrounds, so it arrives in pieces. This page puts those pieces in order. It covers the story so far, checked against the game’s lore on October 17, 2026, and it will change as the game does.

ARC Raiders lore timeline: what happened, in order

The short version: the Collapse → the Exodus → Sunrise → the First Wave → Victory Ridge → a few years of peace → the Second Wave → life underground in Toledo and Speranza → today. The game gives no dates, only the order.

#	Era	What happened	Where you see it
1	The Collapse	Generations ago, floods, fires and earthquakes broke the old world. Today it survives mostly as legend.	The flooded and overgrown ruins; Buried City, a port town once called Marano, preserved under sand
2	The Exodus	Legend has a small group fleeing into space from Acerra aboard advanced shuttles while everything fell apart. The shuttles themselves are a mystery.	The giant launch towers at Acerra Spaceport; scraps of Exodus tech, which Toledo treasures
3	Sunrise	Life got better for a while. At the Alcantara Dam, settlers grew food in hydroponic domes powered by salvaged solar panels, and for the first time in generations people were hopeful.	The domes at Dam Battlegrounds
4	The First Wave	Then the machines came down, and the settlers lost what they had built. The people at the Dam took up arms, put up outposts and became the first Raiders.	First Wave outposts around the surface; the husks of the Barons, the most destructive First Wave machines
5	Victory Ridge	After more than a decade of fighting, the first Raiders won the Battle of Victory Ridge and drove ARC out of the Rust Belt. It cost many lives and most of their technology.	Victory Ridge, on the Dam Battlegrounds map
6	The respite	Several years of peace.
7	The Second Wave	ARC returned in a form that was harder to beat. The survivors dug in underground, and over time the city of Toledo took shape down there.	The tunnels (“tubes”) that lead from the underground to the surface maps
8	Speranza (date not given)	Celeste, who grew up losing her home to ARC again and again, founded Speranza; the lore doesn’t say when. Thousands live there now, and it is safer from ARC than most of the Rust Belt.	Your home base: the traders, your Raider Den and Scrappy the rooster
9	Today (spoilers below)	Raiders work topside for Speranza. Across the trader quests, a strange signal appears, ARC behaviour seems to shift, and new places such as Stella Montis open up.	The trader quests
10	October 2026: Frozen Trail	A real-world update, not a lore entry yet: Raiders travel to Pendola Pass, a frozen mountain region at the edge of the Rust Belt.	The Frozen Trail update

What happened to Earth in ARC Raiders?

Floods, fires and earthquakes, according to the lore. It calls that disaster the Collapse and places it many generations before the game. Beyond that, the details are hazy. The story has been retold for so long that it is mostly legend now, and the old world shows through in only a few places, such as Buried City, the port town of Marano kept under sand dunes.

The machines came much later. When ARC arrived, the planet had already started to heal during Sunrise, so ARC is the second disaster in the story, not the first.

What was the Exodus in ARC Raiders?

The Exodus was the escape of a few survivors into space as the world collapsed. They are said to have left from Acerra Spaceport, whose launch towers still stand out on the skyline. Little is known about how the escape worked, because the shuttles’ technology was lost in the Collapse; the few scraps that remain are treasured in Toledo.

The Exodus is also at the heart of a fan theory: that the people who left are connected to ARC. The game hasn’t confirmed that. Nothing in the lore so far says who built or sent the machines.

What were the First Wave and the Second Wave?

They were the two great ARC invasions. The First Wave hit during Sunrise and destroyed nearly everything the settlers had rebuilt. Those early machines were the easier ones to beat, which is part of why the first Raiders could win. The Barons were the worst of them (minor quest spoiler): Shani says they caused more destruction than every other machine put together.

The war lasted over a decade and ended at Victory Ridge, where ARC was pushed out of the Rust Belt. Two of the traders have personal ties to that war (minor quest spoiler): Celeste fought in it alongside her squad, and the losses still hurt her, while Tian Wen’s mother was part of the Raider resistance. After a few years of peace, the Second Wave arrived with better machines, and this time the survivors moved underground to stay alive.

Why do people live underground in ARC Raiders?

Because the surface belongs to ARC. Anyone who settles up there is in danger from the machines. After the Second Wave, people dug in below ground, where Toledo took shape, and most of them stay down there; Raiders are the exception.

Speranza depends on them. The city keeps needing supplies from the surface, and Raiders are the ones who risk the trip to fetch them. Its citizens even hand out free basic loadouts to Raiders who are running low on gear.

Who runs Speranza? The traders, explained

Celeste leads Speranza, and four other traders work out of it. Each of them hands you jobs, and between them those jobs carry the history of the region.

Trader	Who they are	Their part in the story
Celeste	Leader and founder of Speranza	Has a way out ready for everyone if things go wrong
Shani	Head of security and Speranza’s ARC expert	Keeps a backup for every backup, and is the ARC expert Celeste leans on when planning trips topside
Lance	A medic, and an android	Doesn’t remember who he used to be
Tian Wen	Gunsmith and recluse	Has little patience for Raiders, yet can’t leave a broken thing unrepaired
Apollo	A mechanic who roams from place to place; for now he’s staying in Speranza	Doesn’t say much about where he’s been; runs a kids’ football team and makes sure the library has books

What is happening in the ARC Raiders story right now?

Spoiler warning: this section reveals trader quest storylines.

ARC is changing, and Speranza is trying to find out why. Speranza has picked up a signal unlike anything heard before, and Celeste is uneasy: “Even the slightest change to ARC’s behavior could spell disaster.” The clues pile up from there:

• ARC is on the hunt. ARC Probes are out looking for Speranza, and Celeste warns that ARC has tracked down others before, with grim results.
• Something may be listening from above. Shani suspects the Surveyors, the biggest of the rollers, are beaming data up into orbit, and she wonders whether it’s tied to the signal.
• ARC may be harvesting something. Harvesters, mysterious ARC structures, turn up on the maps with the Queen standing guard, and some crashed Couriers turn out to be carrying soil samples.
• The danger is getting closer. “Those distant rumbles are getting less distant with each passing day,” Shani warns, and a collapsed highway looks like new damage, not old ruin.
• Someone else is fighting ARC. At Blue Gate, Raiders find a downed machine that Speranza didn’t bring down, and Shani is sure no lone survivor did it.
• Lance may not be the only android. One of the first Raiders into Stella Montis, an abandoned facility in the northern mountains, tells Lance she saw others like him there.

So far, none of these threads has been resolved in the lore we checked: nobody knows who brought down the machine at Blue Gate, or why there might be androids in Stella Montis.

What is the Frozen Trail update about?

Frozen Trail (October 8, 2026) took Raiders to a new mountain map, Pendola Pass, for the game’s first anniversary. Embark Studios describes Pendola Pass as a frozen region at the edge of the Rust Belt (its launch post calls the trip going beyond the Rust Belt), says one of the huge machines called Emperors has fallen there and ARC is responding, and adds the Frigate, a massive airborne carrier now patrolling the Rust Belt.

That’s real-world update news. When we checked, none of the lore sources we use covered Frozen Trail yet, so this page doesn’t claim anything about what the Emperor or the Frigate mean for the story. We’ll update it when they do.

Why do Raiders fight each other?

Because everyone up there is after the same loot. A Raider faces ARC and also rivals who want what’s in their bag. In Wikipedia’s summary, nothing governs raiding, and while Raiders are urged to work together, some turn on each other for their loot. The quests reflect it too (minor quest spoiler): in one of Celeste’s, Raiders have taken over her old First Wave EMP trap to cut each other’s comms and set up ambushes.

What don’t we know yet about the ARC Raiders story?

The biggest questions are still open. As of October 17, 2026, the game’s lore doesn’t answer:

• Who made or sent ARC, and why it attacks. The lore only ever calls the machines mysterious. Our guide to what the ARC are covers the clues and the fan theories.
• What happened to the people of the Exodus, and how they left.
• Who Lance was before he lost his memories.
• What lies beyond the Rust Belt. Raiders can join Expeditions that leave the region with everything they own, and as far as the lore says, nobody who left has ever come back.

How is the ARC Raiders story told?

Through the world, not through a campaign. The game had 72 trader quests in December 2025, the latest dated count we found, and Embark added 22 more with the Frozen Trail update on October 8, 2026. Each map also comes with a history of what happened there. The traders’ backgrounds fill in the people. That’s why the story feels scattered: you learn the Collapse from Buried City, the Exodus from Acerra Spaceport and the First Wave from the Dam, often out of order. For where to find each piece, see does ARC Raiders have a story mode?, and for the whole world, our ARC Raiders guides.