ARC Raiders Workshop Upgrades, Priority Order and Materials
Which Workshop station to upgrade first in ARC Raiders, why economy-first beats weapons-first, and where to farm the materials each tier actually needs.
Draft: this page has not cleared review and is not indexed.
Speranza has six upgradeable Workshop stations, and every raid you run without upgrading the right one first is a raid spent under-equipped relative to what you could be running. The instinct is to rush weapons. The stronger opening move is to rush the stations that make every later upgrade cheaper and faster to reach.
- Initial version, current against Live Update 1.42.0.
The six stations
| Station | Covers |
|---|---|
| Gunsmith | Weapons and weapon mods |
| Gear Bench | Armor and augments |
| Medical Lab | Healing and revival items |
| Explosives Station | Grenades and ARC-damage explosives |
| Utility Station | Cloaks, ziplines, mobility and extraction tools |
| Refiner | Converts low-tier scrap into higher-tier materials |
Priority order
Upgrade the Refiner first. It doesn't make gear, it makes your other upgrades cheaper: every material shortfall on every later station gets less painful once the Refiner can turn common scrap into the rarer materials those stations actually ask for. Rushing anything else first means paying full retail, in scarce materials, for the rest of your Workshop progression.
Gear Bench and Medical Lab come second, for survivability. A better shield and a reliable healing loadout keep you alive long enough to keep looting, which is worth more early than raw weapon damage.
Gunsmith is third: once your economy and your survivability are both functional, weapon depth is where the marginal upgrade point does the most for your win rate.
Utility Station or Explosives Station is fourth, and a genuine toss-up past this point. Pick Utility if you're dying to extraction pressure and rotations, pick Explosives if ARC encounters (Bastions especially) are the thing killing your runs.
Common misconception
Gunsmith-first is the instinctive move because a better gun feels like the most direct power spike. In practice it's the Refiner that determines how many total upgrades you can afford across your whole Workshop. Skipping it just pushes the material shortage downstream to every other station.
What each tier costs
Embark hasn't published an official materials table, so treat the figures below as community-documented, not confirmed. Check your own Level Up screen for your current tier before committing materials. With that caveat: every station follows the same shape across the third-party guides checked, reaching Level 2 for one ARC part plus two auxiliary materials, and Level 3 repeating that same two-part cost structure at a higher material tier. Maxing a single station out fully is reported to draw from roughly 40 distinct item types across both tiers combined, which is the real argument for the Refiner-first order above, since it's the only station that turns your surplus of common materials into the specific items the other five keep asking for.
Where to farm the materials
| Zone | Concentrated in |
|---|---|
| Spaceport | Electrical components, tech parts, ARC circuitry |
| Dam Battlegrounds | Mechanical components, industrial materials, metal parts |
| Marano Park | Fabric, chemicals, and Scrappy-line upgrade materials |
| Abandoned facility zones | Mixed general materials, plus ARC-unit-specific drops |
Related reading
For which items to hoard toward these upgrades versus sell on sight, see What to Sell, Keep, or Recycle.
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.