ARC Raiders Expedition 3: Season 4 Trials, Resets & Skill Points Guide

Expedition 3 closed on May 11, 2026 at 07:00 UTC. If you signed up, your Raider is gone. Not paused, not archived: departed. The game has wiped your level, skills, inventory, and workshops back to level 1. Congrats. Everything you built over the last two months is a distant memory wrapped in a bad decision you made voluntarily.

The good news: cosmetics, Raider Tokens, Codex entries, Trials progress, and leaderboard position all survive the reset. The ARC Raiders hard reset is brutal but not total. Your account-level identity remains. Your workshops, however, are starting over from level 1, which is exactly as annoying as it sounds.

KNOWN ISSUE: Missing Skill Points after completing the expedition. Embark is investigating. Do not panic. Do panic slightly.

Skill Points: No More Hoarding, Just Violence

Expedition 3 scrapped stash value as the Skill Point metric. You no longer win by being the most paranoid hoarder on the server. Instead, ARC Raiders Expedition Skill Points are now earned by dealing damage during the window. Any damage: weapons, gadgets, PvP, ARC enemies: all counts. The practice range does not, because that would have been too reasonable.

Embark's internal testing found 8,000–10,000 damage is achievable in a single good round. For reference, 100,000 damage is roughly equivalent to destroying 20 Bastions. Do the math on how many raids that takes and start re-evaluating your weekend plans accordingly.

Players who missed Skill Points in prior Expeditions can use the catch-up system. Complete the damage challenge first to unlock it. Each missed point costs 300,000 coins or stash value: discounted from the regular rate, because Embark does occasionally show mercy.

Trials Season 4: Finally Fixed, Mostly

Trials Season 4 ARC Raiders launched April 29, 202one day after Riven Tides dropped. For the first time, Trials run concurrently with the Expedition window instead of going on hiatus. This is objectively the correct decision and it only took three seasons to get there.

Embark made three structural changes that actually matter. Major map conditions no longer award double points, meaning you are no longer punished for not getting lucky with an Electromagnetic Storm spawn. Trials are no longer locked to specific map conditions at all. And the variety of trial objectives has expanded to include more key-based and cache-searching tasks rather than "pray the right weather shows up."

Season 4 Trial Types Active Now

• Damage ARC enemies on the beaches: Riven Tides, broad coastal areas. Bring snitch scanners. If a turbine spawns, exploit it mercilessly.
• Damage Vaporizers: Buried City is your best bet. Use cover. Take the shot. Get out. Vaporizers demand heavy weapons, which on expedition week is a genuinely sadistic design choice.
• Damage Fireflies: Buried City or Riven Tides. Riven Tides has more of them swarming around than you will ever want to deal with.
• Search Raider Caches: Listen for the ticking sound, follow it, collect the cache. Target 5–8 to reliably hit three stars. Whether this works with hurricane-wave caches is still being tested.
• Search ARC Probes, Couriers, and Assessors: Electromagnetic Storm remains the higher-yield option for probes and couriers. Close Scrutiny is not guaranteed to deliver the Assessor score you think it will.

The Blindspot Outfit is the Season 4 Trials reward. Base unlock at Tryhard I. Additional cosmetic variants at Hotshot and Cantina Legend. The outfit is Riven Tides-themed with water components, which is either thematic design or someone at Embark having a laugh.

The ARC Raiders Caravan guide for Expedition 3 follows the same six-stage structure as before. Commit items to each stage and they are gone. No refunds. No partial retrieval. This is not a bug; Embark has decided irrevocability is a feature.

Stage 4 is where most players stall. The items are rare, specific, and not things you typically prioritize picking up. Use the MetaForge app's needed-items tracker to plan your runs before you burn raids on the wrong loot.

The Damage Report: What You Lost and What Survived

Let's be clinical about this. ARC Raiders what resets after Expedition is a question worth answering before you commit, not after. Here is the actual breakdown.

Gone

• Raider level and skill tree
• Full inventory and stash contents
• Workshops (return to level 1)
• Coins and in-game currency tied to the Raider

Survives

• Cosmetics and Raider Tokens
• Codex entries and Trophy Display progress
• Unlocked map regions and Raider Deck progress
• Trials rank and leaderboard position
• Permanent Expedition rewards from prior runs (stash slots, Skill Points)
• Anything purchased with real money

Temporary buffs: increased XP, extra Scrappy materials, better repair returns: Expedition consecutive rewards stack up to three times if you depart on back-to-back Expeditions. Miss one window and the entire streak resets. Not reduced. Resets.

The ABM Disaster and Extract Campers: A Grievance Section

The ABM system broke spectacularly toward the end of the Expedition window. ARC Raiders PvP PvE lobby bug had PvP players in PvE lobbies, PvE players in PvP lobbies, and nobody entirely sure which apocalypse they had signed up for. Some PvP players were confused enough to simply leave and restart. Others were not. That's extraction shooters for you.

Extract camping remains a problem. It will continue to be a problem. If you are doing it: you know what you are, and you have made peace with it. If you are on the receiving end: the healthy response is documentation, the natural response is a second account dedicated entirely to revenge camping. Neither solves anything.