Arc Raiders: Digging Up Dirt Quest Guide & Walkthrough

Celeste has decided you're trustworthy enough to snoop through someone else's mail. The Arc Raiders Digging Up Dirt quest unlocks after you finish Tribute To Toledo, and it rewards you with the thrilling privilege of climbing a building to steal a package from a fountain. Riveting. Below is everything you need, because apparently a scout who "saw the whole thing" couldn't be bothered to mark the exact spot.

Quest Overview

This is basically a corporate espionage errand dressed up as a scavenger hunt. Every digging up dirt quest guide online agrees on one thing: the santa maria houses location is easy to name and annoyingly hard to reach. It sits in the southern half of Old Town, and no, staring at the street level entrance for ten minutes will not summon a door.

Step-by-Step Walkthrough

Here's how a functioning adult completes this without alerting three ARC units and a rival squad. Follow it, or don't, and enjoy explaining to your team why you died in a sandpit.

1. Approach Santa Maria Houses, ideally from the south, so the rooftops are actually reachable instead of a taunting silhouette.
2. Get onto the roof. Use the bridges connecting nearby buildings, or place a zipline if your legs refuse to cooperate.
3. Look for a pink building near a yellow bell tower landmark. Ignore the obvious metal walkway toward the yellow building; that's the wrong door, and yes, people fall for it constantly.
4. Vault through the open window on the pink building's roof. Welcome to the attic. Try not to trip.
5. Ride the zipline down one level. You'll land somewhere that smells like poor life choices.
6. Find the hole in the wall to your left. Crawl through it like the dignified professional you are.
7. You're now in a sand-filled interior courtyard. Locate the fountain in the center: that's your santa maria houses dead drop.
8. Interact with the fountain. Objective complete. No extraction needed, so stop hovering nervously by the exit.

Loadout tip: This quest completes the instant you touch the dead drop, so bring a free kit. Losing your favorite rifle to a Sentinel turret for a fetch quest is not character development, it's just bad planning.

The arc raiders buried city quest chain has a habit of funneling players into cramped rooms full of things that want them dead, and this one is no exception. Expect the following unpleasantness:

Clear slowly. This is not the moment to sprint in guns blazing and hope for the best; that strategy has never worked, in this game or in life.

Why This Quest Matters

If you're wondering why anyone bothers with a fetch quest this fiddly, here's the honest answer: it's part of a longer arc where the Old Town Tubes Management gets exposed as a fraud running on borrowed authority. As a bonus, finishing it advances your standing with Celeste and hands over crafting materials for anyone chasing a digging up dirt walkthrough for full completion credit, not just the story beat.

Common Mistakes

• Searching the ground floor first. The entrance is not at street level. It never was. Stop looking.
• Following the obvious metal walkway. That leads to the wrong building and a wasted five minutes.
• Bringing valuable gear. There's no extraction requirement, so risking your best loadout here is self-inflicted.
• Rushing the courtyard. The turret and Pops don't care about your schedule.

Players tackling the broader arc raiders old town quest lineup tend to make these same mistakes repeatedly, mostly because the map design rewards vertical thinking that nobody applies until they've already died twice.

Rewards Breakdown

Completing this hands you Advanced Electrical Components and Speaker Components. Unglamorous, yes, but they feed directly into higher-tier crafting recipes, which is more than can be said for most of the junk cluttering your stash right now. Anyone tallying digging up dirt rewards across the full questline will notice these materials show up again as bottlenecks later, so hoard them instead of vendoring them out of impatience.

Final Tips

Treat every arc raiders celeste quest the same way: assume the objective is simple and the location is not. Santa Maria Houses rewards patience, vertical exploration, and a willingness to double back when the obvious path is wrong. For genuinely useful digging up dirt tips, remember this: go up before you go in, and check the ceiling before you check your ego.