ARC Raiders What to Sell, Keep, or Recycle
A patch-versioned triage system for ARC Raiders loot, what to keep for Workshop upgrades, what to recycle for materials, and what's pure sell-fodder, with the categories that actually change between patches called out.
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Every item you pick up in a raid answers to one question the moment you're back in Speranza: keep it, recycle it, or sell it. Get this triage wrong for a run or two and it barely matters. Get it wrong for weeks and you're the raider still stuck on Gunsmith level 1 sitting on a full stash tab of things you should've broken down forty raids ago.
- Initial version, current against Live Update 1.42.0.
The three-bucket system
Almost every item in ARC Raiders' loot pool sorts into one of three buckets: keep, recycle, or sell. The game tells you which one via the item's rarity color and its inventory tooltip. Always check the tooltip's "Used in" and "Can be recycled into" lines before you commit, because the bucket an item belongs to can shift when a new Workshop tier or Expedition Project goes live.
Keep anything named as a requirement on a Workshop station's next Level Up screen, or on an active Expedition Project. This is the bucket that changes fastest: an item that was safe to sell last week can become a hard requirement the moment you unlock a new station tier.
Recycle items with no direct crafting use themselves but which break down at a Speranza recycling station into materials that do have one. This is your steady-state source of common crafting materials once your stash starts filling with duplicate Rare and Epic gear you don't need to keep intact.
Sell items with no crafting or project use at all; they convert straight to credits. Nothing is lost by selling these the moment you extract, since there's no delayed-use case for them.
Items to protect from your own inventory-clearing habits
A handful of materials are scarce enough, relative to how often Workshop upgrades and Expedition Projects call for them, that reflexively selling or recycling them on sight will cost you real progression time later:
- Motors
- Cooling Coils
- Laboratory Reagents
- Rusted Gears
- Industrial Batteries
- Rusted Shut Medical Kits
None of these are rare drops in the sense of "you'll wait ten raids to see one." They're rare relative to how many separate upgrade tiers ask for them. The failure mode is selling them for a few hundred credits early, then needing three of them for a Gunsmith Level 3 push and having zero in the stash.
Solid, low-regret recycling targets
| Item | Recycles toward |
|---|---|
| Damaged Heat Sinks | Electrical/tech-tier materials |
| Alarm Clocks | Simple gun parts / mechanical scrap |
| Spectrometers | Tech-tier crafting materials |
| Microscopes | Tech-tier crafting materials |
Common misconception
Recycling is not strictly better than selling. Recycling only pays off once you actually have a use for the output material. If your stash is already overflowing with the mid-tier material something breaks down into, that recycle action just traded a sellable item for a material you'll never spend, and you'd have been better off selling it outright for credits.
What's pure sell-fodder
Trinkets (playing cards, music albums, statuettes, and most food items that aren't consumed for a buff) carry no crafting or project use in the current build. Their entire value is the credit number on the tooltip. Sell these the moment you're back in Speranza rather than letting them eat stash space "just in case."
Related reading
For the Workshop stations these materials actually feed into, see ARC Raiders Workshop Upgrades: Priority Order and Materials.
Sources
The Forge’s one room today is EU5/Paradox. There is no ARC room yet.
The Embriters there are glad to talk ARC Raiders too. Drop in.