We’re changing how we update ARC Raiders – here’s what it means for you

Embark Studios has announced a significant shift for ARC Raiders, moving from a monthly update schedule to a bi-annual cadence to focus on more “transformative” content. While the developers admitted that the monthly cycle was becoming unsustainable, this change is intended to give them the breathing room to release much larger, impactful updates twice a year—starting with the massive “Frozen Trail” expansion coming this October.

Here at Metaforge we will continue to update our Interactive Maps, Trackers and all our tools but also be on the lookout for the big updates Embark are promising!

This is the update from Embark:

We’re changing how we update the game

When ARC Raiders launched, we planned to offer monthly updates. The intention was to keep you all engaged, to ensure the game always felt fresh, and to give you reasons to keep braving topside. But once the game was in players’ hands, we saw that the kind of long-term experience we want to create for ARC Raiders requires more transformative updates. 

Over time, we’ve found that the pressure of a monthly cycle limits how impactful these updates can be. You feel it, and we feel it too. Running at that pace isn’t sustainable, or compatible with the bigger ambitions we have for this game. 

Major updates will come twice a year

Going forward, we’ve made the decision to release major updates twice a year – larger in scale, more impactful, with the goal to genuinely change how you play the game. Don’t worry, a dedicated live service team will continue running ARC Raiders day-to-day: regular live updates, plus balance fixes, bug fixes, store updates, and player events aren’t going anywhere.

This additional development space also allows us to invest more deeply in the health of ARC Raiders, from progression and economy balancing to fair play and anti-cheat efforts. We know these are foundational to the experience, especially in a game where every encounter and extraction matters. 

Frozen Trail: our biggest update yet

Our next major update lands in October, and it’s the largest we’ve released since launch. This isn’t just about volume, it’s designed to address the broader questions the community has been asking. Here’s a taste of what’s coming:

• A Sprawling New Frontier – Explore a new landscape in the Rust Belt with layered design and new mysteries to uncover in the largest map in the game. 
• Our Most Ambitious ARC Operation So Far – including new ARC enemies with fresh designs, and unique behaviors that will challenge Raiders in new ways.
• New Systems of Progression – Many players have maxed out their Raider Den and hit the Skill Point ceiling. Frozen Trail will introduce new goals and more ways to shape your Raider’s progression.
• Exploring the origin of ARC – What are ARC and where do they come from? Frozen Trail gives Raiders the opportunity to begin uncovering that mystery. 
• Improved Skill Tree
• Alongside new weapons, items, instruments, cosmetics and more

It’s important to understand, we’re not just stacking new content on top of the existing experience. We’re refining core systems to support a more meaningful long-term experience – one you genuinely want to keep returning to. Frozen Trail is just the beginning of where we want to take ARC Raiders, and we’ll share more in the coming months.

Starting next week: a new trader 

Next week, we’re introducing a fresh mechanic designed for late-game players: a new Trader from a nomadic tribe of surface-dwellers.

Many of you have invested a lot in the game, and there’s a few common problems that we keep hearing about:

• You’re holding a lot of high-value items with no way to offload them in rewarding ways.
• Your Stash is filling up with the game’s new items and we haven’t increased the capacity.
• Very few of you are going on the Expedition, either because it is not rewarding enough, or because it is too painful to part with your favorite items and Blueprints. 

The new Trader unlocks at level 25, and he offers unique rewards, rare items, and cosmetics in exchange for your high-value items. He will take items off your hands in return for these weekly rotating rewards, but he may sometimes ask you to go and find specific rare items to trade.

The new Trader also offers two perks in exchange for high-value items: 

• Extra Stash space to help you increase your capacity. 
• The Expedition Vault. This allows you to carry over up to five items across the Expedition, so you can set your new Raider up with your favorite items or blueprints. 

This is just one part of a broader set of improvements arriving later this year.

Building for the long-term

One thing that has become increasingly clear since launch is how important progression and player goals are to the ARC Raiders experience. If you love ARC Raiders, you want more reasons to keep returning to the Rust Belt – and we want to build systems that continue evolving alongside the game.

Some of the progression improvements we want to implement simply need more development time that we haven’t been able to address properly while running on a monthly cycle. Moving to larger updates allows us to spend more time refining the systems players engage with the most.

We’re working to deepen progression across multiple areas of ARC Raiders, while continuing to expand how players shape and personalize their Raider. We’re also investing more into features like Trials so they remain reliably fun to engage with, not a grind. We’re also putting effort into making the Expedition Project more rewarding – and less punishing – to pursue. This is an ongoing part of ARC Raiders’ evolution, and you’ll start seeing the first steps of that very soon. 

The bigger picture

It’s important to us that players understand something about where our collective ‘Embark brain’ is at: our ambitions go far beyond what players have seen so far. We want to go further in showing you the wider universe of ARC Raiders. 

We think about ARC Raiders as an experience that should continue expanding over time, and right now we’re still early in that journey. The bi-annual cadence gives us the opportunity to develop to build future updates with more intention, ensuring that gameplay, progression, narrative, and the world itself all move forward together.

Right now, Raiders are facing an escalating ARC threat, and the society in Speranza may feel helpless against it. But Raiders aren’t built to stay on the back foot: the goal has always been bigger than survival – it’s about one day reclaiming the surface. 

Frozen Trail will start to progress this goal and expose elements of this challenge, but it is really just the beginning. We aim to constantly shift the paradigm that Raiders operate under so you feel the effects of your actions and perseverance against ARC.