When I think back to my early raids in ARC Raiders, I can still feel that horrible "I have no idea what I am doing" tension, the kind that makes your hands sweat while you try to buy ARC Raiders Coins on your second monitor between wipes. I would chase every shiny pink item, fall off cliffs like it was my job, and go home broke most runs. After a few hundred hours of failed extracts, weird bugs, and too many nights in the Cold Snap, the game finally clicked. The trick is to stop treating it like a basic shooter and start leaning into the stuff the game never really explains.
Movement That Keeps You Alive
The physics in this game do not care about your feelings, so you have to work around them. Most players just sprint everywhere, roll when they panic, and then wonder why they explode on impact after a small jump. There is a better way. The slide–roll chain is the real backbone of movement: jump off the ledge, tap crouch mid-air so you land in a slide, then dive straight into a roll just before you hit the ground. Do it clean and you keep your speed and dodge fall damage, even off the tall towers near the Dam. It feels weird at first, but your brain gets used to the timing fast. Also, stop trusting vaults over gaps. The animation bugs out and drops you into the void more often than it should. Use vaults over low cover instead for that tiny speed bump, and always eat while running by just holding interact so you are not standing still chewing a sandwich in the open.
Routes That Actually Print Money
Being poor in this game is brutal, and it pushes players into the same boring Dam vault route. Everyone beelines for the main Power Gen vault, grabs what they can, and extracts as soon as they see anything purple. That is fine for learning, but the real money is in chaining extra vaults while the lobby is busy somewhere else. A simple route that works well from the east spawn is to hit the primary Dam vault first, then cut straight to the west highway overpass. There is a server rack there that unlocks a secondary vault with high-tier crates, and if you do this during night cycles, the value jumps in a big way. Pulling over 100k per run becomes normal, not a lucky spike. When you want a quieter run, climb up to the rooftop antenna hatch at Stella Montis. The climb is annoying, which is exactly why most squads skip it, and that leaves a pile of mid to high-tier loot just sitting there waiting.
Fights, Panic, And Not Wasting Ammo
Combat feels wild at first, but once you know where to shoot, the fights get a lot less random. Against ARC units, ignore the big armored plates and look for the yellow vents and exposed cores. Dumping mags into armor just drains your pockets. Even a low-level Bobcat shotgun with a choke can delete drones fast if you are willing to play close. When a Hulk starts throwing fireballs, people love to roll sideways and then wonder why they still get burned; sliding straight under the projectile works way better and feels safer once you trust it. PvP is messier. That little "friendly" wiggle is almost never friendly. If someone wiggles at you in a hot area, assume they want your backpack and act first. Decoys are huge here too. Toss one and ARC bots will chase the noise while you reposition or slip away, and if there is another squad nearby, they often assume the bots are tracking you, not a fake target.
Staying Ahead Of The Grind
The economy can crush your mood if you let every death wipe half your net worth. Keep the workshop going with three benches rolling whenever you are offline so you wake up to extra gear and pinks ready to go, and do not hoard everything like you are never going to die again. Some players hit a point where the blueprint and coin grind just feels like a second job, and that is when people start looking at sites like u4gm to pick up extra resources and skip the early game poverty loop. Whether you stick to pure in-game grind or mix in a shortcut, the goal is the same: you want enough of a buffer that a bad night of drops, a few dumb falls, or one scuffed raid does not push you back to running around with nothing but a basic gun and a dream.
