ARC Raiders Trials Season 5 Guide: Ranks & Full Rewards

Season 4 is dead, long live ARC Raiders Trials Season 5, which launches July 7, 2026 at 12:00 UTC and grinds on until September 30, 2026 at 07:00 UTC. Nearly three months of weekly objectives, all so you can unlock a jacket. The developers call this "proving your mettle." Everyone else calls it Tuesday.

 If you want to survive the machine threat and bring back the best salvage, you obviously must read the following:

• ARC Raiders Geiger Counter Locations
• ARC Raiders Trials Season 5 Guide
• A First Foothold: ARC Raiders Guide

(Lock and load, keep your eyes on the sky, and don't let the ARC catch you slippin'!)

What Actually Changed This Season

The headline reward is the Scorta outfit, doled out in fragments based on your final rank, because nothing says "reward" like being handed 20% of a jacket. Hit Hotshot or Cantina Legend and you get exclusive red and blue color variants, so the two people who reach those tiers can look distinct from the thousands who didn't. New objectives this cycle include damaging specific ARC types with specific weapons and absorbing Pop explosions directly to the face, which is either a challenge or a cry for help, depending on your build.

Trials unlock at Level 15. If you're not there yet, go be a person for a while and come back later.

Season 5 Key Dates

Every week you get five challenges. Extract, and your best score per challenge gets banked forever, or at least until the season ends and everyone resets to feel small again. Some objectives pay per point of damage, others pay a flat lump on kill, and a handful only count on one specific map, because consistency is for other games. Below is a sample of known point values from prior rotations, since Embark hasn't published Season 5's exact numbers yet, and the community is left doing math homework nobody assigned.

Reach 1,000, 2,000, and 3,000 points on a single trial and you'll automatically bank an Uncommon, Rare, and Epic item or blueprint after extraction, once per tier per week. This is the game's way of giving you a participation trophy that occasionally isn't garbage.

ARC Raiders Ranks List: All 14 Tiers

The full ARC Raiders ranks list runs from Rookie to Cantina Legend, split into sub-tiers of three, because apparently one number wasn't humiliating enough. New Raiders start at Rookie I. Returning Raiders drop two ranks below their previous season's finish, a mercy that feels more like a slow-motion demotion.

1. Rookie I – III
2. Tryhard I – III
3. Wildcard I – III
4. Daredevil I – III
5. Hotshot
6. Cantina Legend

Divisions of 100 players get sorted weekly by combined best scores. Finish in the top slice and you get promoted, sometimes double or triple speed if you're near the bottom ranks. Fall behind and you get demoted, silently, while the game says nothing comforting whatsoever. Cantina Legend is reserved for the top 1,000 players inside Hotshot on the global leaderboard, no divisions, just raw humiliation at scale.

Here's the pitch behind the entire Trials rank rewards ladder: climb high enough and every lower tier's cosmetics come bundled in automatically. So technically Cantina Legend gets you the whole set. Practically, you'll get Rookie III's backpack charm, quit around Wildcard II, and tell your friends you "were basically Hotshot."

Fastest Way to Climb the Trials Leaderboard

If you actually want to move up the Trials leaderboard instead of just complaining about it, stop trying to complete all five weekly objectives in one raid. Pick one, build your loot route around it, repeat until you beat your prior score, then move to the next. Prioritize any map running Night Raid, Electromagnetic Storm, or Hidden Bunker conditions: those tend to double your point gain for identical effort, which is the closest thing this genre offers to a discount.

Extraction is mandatory. Die with a personal best sitting in your pocket and the game keeps it anyway: Trials points, unlike your loot, don't get wiped on death.

Season 5 Setting: Nomads, ARC Escalation, and Heavy Armor

Narratively, ARC Raiders Season 5 release date lore ties into rising ARC activity and shaky new alliances forming with the Nomads, which in practice means more machines shooting at you while a tentative peace treaty gets negotiated somewhere off-screen. The developers' advice: gear up in heavy armor. Their exact phrasing was to "suit up like a juggernaut," which is a nice way of saying you're about to get out-gunned regardless of what you wear.