ARC Raiders Loot Priority: What to Keep, What to Toss

Eight out of ten people who play ARC Raiders die for one dumb reason — they try to carry everything home. They get greedy mid-loot, then can't bring themselves to throw anything away back at base, and the stash keeps filling until they can't find the materials they actually need. I played my first two weeks exactly like that. It took me a while to realize that in this game, how much something is worth has almost nothing to do with its rarity color.

Don't Judge Value by Rarity

I used to assume purple and blue meant "good," until I kept getting stuck on upgrades and realized a thing's value has almost nothing to do with its color, and everything to do with what you're short on right now.

• Before you sell anything, check your quests, workbench projects, and the vendors' weekly offers — hold onto whatever's actually needed.
• When you're not sure, toss it in your Safe Pocket and decide at the extraction point. Don't sit there agonizing over a corpse.

My rule for looting now comes down to one thing — does it feed whatever I'm building right now? If it does, keep it. If it doesn't, it's just taking up space.

Keep These Without Thinking — Straight Into the Safe Pocket

A handful of items are scarce at every stage of the game, ranked higher than your primary weapon. See them, grab them.

• Blueprints and exotic schematics go straight into the Safe Pocket. They permanently unlock recipes, and losing one stings for a long time.
• Gun Parts, light to heavy, all of them. They take less space than a whole weapon and double as the universal currency for repairs and crafting.
• ARC Powercells and Duct Tape — one feeds advanced crafting and workbench upgrades, the other you're burning through constantly.

I basically treat these as "not picking it up is a loss." Gun Parts especially — loose parts beat a full weapon by a mile on value-per-slot. A lot of people don't know this and end up with a stash full of intact guns but no parts when it's time to repair.

Trinkets and Low-Tier Weapons — Don't Hoard Them

Those little trinkets in the crates look nice, but they're all just coin. Sell them early, and don't let them eat your slots.

• Lance's Mixtape, Snow Globes, Music Boxes, Playing Cards — sell them all. They're the fastest source of early coin.
• Intact weapons below your current tier go to the weapon vendor, not the scrapper. They sell for more than they'd break down into.
• For surplus common materials, keep enough for the next two recipes and sell the rest.

I was dirt poor early on because I couldn't part with these little trinkets. Eventually I realized the slot is worth more than the sentiment — once the stash stays clean, my coin farming actually sped up.

Don't Sell Broken Stuff — Scrap It Instead

When it comes to junk, broken items are the reverse of intact ones — sell what's intact, scrap what's broken.

• Weapons beat to hell shouldn't go to the vendor. Scrapping them returns parts worth more than the sale price.
• Broken flashlights, broken radios, broken guidance systems — extract them and break them down at your workbench. Salvaging mid-raid returns fewer components, so only do it when you're desperate for inventory space.
• Check the preview before you scrap; some broken items return parts that beat stockpiling raw materials for space.

I learned this one the hard way — I scrapped a pile of stuff mid-raid to make space, then realized back at base I'd thrown away parts from several weapons I could have kept intact.

When it comes down to it, looting in ARC Raiders is just a judgment call about what's worth keeping — and the standard is always "what do I need right now," not "how rare is this thing." Blueprints and Gun Parts, keep without thinking. Trinkets and low-tier weapons, sell for coin. Broken stuff, scrap back at base. Get into that habit and your stash stays clean, and you won't stall when it's actually time to craft.