ARC Raiders July 7 Guide: Expedition 4 and Trials Bug

Season 5's penultimate arc raiders trials guide week runs June 29 to July 5, and it comes with a built-in trap. The listed objective says damage Leapers, Bastions, and Bombardiers. It lies. Community manager Osin confirmed on Discord that Rocketeers and Vaporizers count instead of Bombardiers. Farm the wrong enemy and enjoy your zero points, earned entirely by trusting the UI like it's ever been trustworthy.

Correction, not a leak: Bombardiers do not count this week. Rocketeers and Vaporizers do. Embark has not hotfixed the display text, so the in-game objective still lies to your face.

Weekly Trials: Read the Fine Print, Not the Icon

Five objectives rotate weekly. This cycle's lineup covers container and blue gate looting, hornet damage, a multi-ARC damage challenge, light impact grenade kills, and kitchen cabinet searching. None of that is complicated. The complication is entirely self-inflicted by a text label nobody bothered to fix.

There's also a clip submission challenge for the community highlight reel, run by community manager Ross. Get featured and you receive the film reel backpack charm, one of the rarer cosmetics in the game, plus 1,150 Raider Tokens. Submit an unedited clip. Nobody wants your fifteen-minute cinematic cut with a lo-fi soundtrack.

This is the actual story, and it's been confirmed directly by Embark, not just YouTube speculation. The fourth Expedition departure window runs 14 days, from July 7 at 11:00 UTC to July 21 at 08:00 UTC. If you're a veteran hitting your fourth reset, the arc raiders expedition 4 rewards structure no longer hands you Skill Points from the challenge. You've capped at 15. That door is closed. Congratulations on your accumulated advantage; it stops accumulating now.

Instead, Embark is testing what it calls a Mystery Reward system. Same damage-based challenge as before, five tiers: 5,000, 10,000, 30,000, 50,000, and 100,000 total damage. Each completed tier grants one random Blueprint plus 150 Raider Tokens. Clear all five and you're looking at five Blueprints and 750 Raider Tokens on your next run.

The arc raiders skill points cap sits at 15 total, and catch-up remains available only for players on their second, third, or fourth Expedition who haven't hit that ceiling yet. If you're not on your fourth reset, none of this applies to you; you keep earning Skill Points like it's still 2025. Signing up is still manual. Completing your Caravan does not register you. It has never registered you. It will never register you. Sign up during the window or watch your damage grinding evaporate into nothing.

Blueprint rewards have zero catch-up mechanic. Skip a tier, lose it forever. Unlike Skill Points, there is no forgiving retroactive top-up here.

Should You Even Bother With the Fourth Expedition?

If you're capped on Skill Points and indifferent to cosmetics, skipping is defensible. The arc raiders raider tokens payout is genuinely permanent value, and the arc raiders blueprint rewards jumpstart a fresh loadout, but you're trading a guaranteed stat advantage for RNG loot that might just duplicate what's already sitting in Ermal's Vault. Embark has openly called this a first test run subject to change, which is developer-speak for "we're watching the Reddit thread."

China's Beta Is Quietly Doing What Global Players Have Begged For

Tencent's regional client, running under a separate license since a January Steam region-lock, opened its "Arc Light Hunter" closed beta on June 24. The headline feature is a map condition variously called Security Protocol or Rebellion Incident, and it is the closest this franchise has come to an actual arc raiders pve mode china test. Every player spawns allied. Nobody can shoot anybody. Loot density gets bumped up to compensate for the removed threat.

Want to fight? You manually trigger rebellion. It takes roughly five seconds to activate, cannot be reversed, and the moment it's live, a red marker permanently paints your position on the compass for the entire lobby. Every peaceful farmer in that match now has explicit permission to hunt you down. It's the extraction shooter equivalent of raising your hand in a room full of people who were told they're allowed to hit you back.

• Default state: full friendly-fire immunity, shared loot pool, cooperative farming
• Opt-in PvP: manual five-second activation, irreversible for the match
• Visual tell: permanent red marker on compass and map, visible to the whole lobby
• Loot compensation: increased density to offset the removed PvP threat

Tencent frames the entire regional build not as an extraction shooter but as a "single-run adventure atmosphere product," which is corporate for "we softened it." A producer interview compared this regional pipeline directly to what Embark previously did with The Finals, suggesting that if the data shows reduced PvPvE friction without gutting the core loop, global adoption becomes plausible. Nothing is confirmed. The arc raiders china beta security protocol system remains exclusive to a separate client with its own servers, its own dev team, and zero crossplay with anything you're currently playing.

The China build also ships loadout presets, letting players save three full gear configurations and drop into a raid with one button press. Global players have wanted this since launch. Global players do not have this. Assume nothing arrives before the Frozen Trail update, rumored for October, and even that is speculation dressed up as a release date.

The July 7 Checklist

1. Farm Rocketeers and Vaporizers this trial week, not the Bombardiers the UI insists on. Confirmed correction from Embark, not a rumor.
2. Submit a clean, unedited clip to the community highlight reel if you want the film reel backpack charm.
3. Finish your Caravan and manually sign up once the Expedition window opens on July 7. Caravan completion alone does nothing.
4. If you're on your fourth Expedition, decide now whether 100,000 damage for random blueprints and Raider Tokens is worth your time over just skipping the reset entirely.
5. Watch the China client if you care where global PvPvE friction design is heading next. Nothing is promised. Everything is possible eventually.