Arc Raiders has kicked off the Expedition Project, and if you're the kind of player who clings to a well-stocked stash, this one's going to sting. It runs from December 17 through December 22, and it's built around a choice: keep your comfort pile now, or trade it in for long-term upside. Nobody's forcing a wipe on you, which helps, but the people chasing extra power will be eyeing every run differently once ARC Raiders Items start feeling like "use it or lose it" decisions.

Getting In Without Getting Burned

First thing's first: you've got to be level 20 before the game even lets you take part. After that, the event asks you to donate five pages' worth of materials to upgrade the caravan. The nice bit is it doesn't punish you for having a life. If you don't finish in this window, your progress sticks around and carries into the next wipe cycle. So you can chip away at it, stash by stash, without feeling like you wasted a weekend because you missed one last drop.

What Actually Gets Reset

Once the caravan's fully upgraded and you send your character beyond the Rust Belt, that's the point of no return. Your stash is gone. Your coins are gone. Workbenches drop back to level one. Questlines? Reset. Blueprints you sweated for? Wiped. It's not the soft kind of reset where you keep the "important stuff." It's the whole profile getting scrubbed clean, and you're basically betting that the permanent unlocks will pay you back later.

The Real Payoff

The headline reward is extra skill points, up to five of them, pushing your cap to 80. But it's not a quick claim-and-go. Each point needs one million coin, or an equivalent stash value, and the full set adds up to five million total value earned. That's a lot of scavenging, selling, and saying "no" to dumb fights. On top of that, there's a permanent boost that hits where it matters: 12 extra stash slots you keep for good. You also snag an Expedition skin, a Scrappy hat, and a profile icon, plus temporary rebuild perks like XP boosts, repair bonuses, and better material returns from Scrappy. Those short-term buffs can stack across Expeditions, but if you skip one, the stack drops back down, which is the game quietly nudging you to stay on the treadmill.

If you're on the fence, think of it like this: the Expedition isn't for the player who's finally "comfortable." It's for the one who's tired of being comfortable and wants a bigger ceiling, even if the floor falls out first. Plan your send-off run, dump what you can into value, and don't pretend the reset won't hurt, because it will. Still, if you want to rebuild fast and keep the momentum, having access to cheap ARC Raiders Items can make the early grind feel less like punishment and more like a fresh push back into the Rust Belt.