ARC Raiders Skill Tree, Full Reference
All three ARC Raiders skill tree branches, how skill points are earned and capped, and how the point-gated unlock structure actually works.
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The full tree spans 45 skills across three branches. You cannot unlock everything on one character. The point pool caps well below the tree's total cost, so the tree is a build-shaping decision, not a checklist to eventually complete.
Earning points
Character level is the only source of skill points: one point per level up, capped at level 75, for a maximum pool of 76 points (the starting point plus 75 level-ups). Since the tree holds 45 skills and most accept multiple upgrade ranks, the realistic ceiling is a strong two-branch build plus a partial third branch, not a fully maxed tree.
The three branches
| Branch | Covers |
|---|---|
| Conditioning | Sustain, melee combat, breaching, downed-state recovery |
| Mobility | Climbing, sprinting, sliding, vaulting, dodge rolls |
| Survival | Looting speed, noise reduction, carry weight, field crafting |
How the gating works
Most individual perks accept up to five upgrade ranks; a handful are single-point unlocks with no further scaling. Deeper skills within a branch are point-gated behind how much you've already invested in that same branch: some skills require roughly 15 points already spent in-branch to unlock, others require roughly 36, though these two thresholds are community-reported and not confirmed against an official Embark skill-tree document. That gating means branch-hopping to sample a bit of everything actively works against reaching a branch's strongest late skills. Committing to fewer branches, deeper, unlocks more of what each branch is actually built to deliver.
Common misconception
Spreading points evenly across all three branches feels safe, but the point-gating structure punishes it directly: the strongest perks in each branch sit behind an in-branch spend threshold, not just a flat level requirement. A build that commits early to two branches will out-power a build that sampled all three by the same total level.
Reading this table going forward
An exact, patch-current, all-45-skill breakdown (effect text and point cost for every individual perk) is exactly the kind of dataset that goes stale the moment a balance pass touches skill costs, which ARC Raiders' cadence of frequent live updates (1.39.0 through 1.42.0 across a single month, per official patch notes) makes a real risk for a hand-transcribed table. Rather than reproduce one here and let it drift out of date, this page holds the structural facts above (branch scope, point caps, gating thresholds) and points you to your own in-game skill tree screen for the current per-perk numbers, which is always the authoritative source.
Related reading
For how your augment choice interacts with a Survival- or Conditioning-heavy build, see ARC Raiders Augments Explained.
Sources
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