If you have been pushing hard to get ready for the Arc Raiders Expedition reset, take a moment and breathe, because the extended signup window means you suddenly have room to think and to plan your stash around high‑value ARC Raiders Items instead of just panic-grinding every night.
What This Reset Really Means
The phrase “optional hard reset” sounds brutal at first. You hit that button and your Raider’s level, skills, and workshop all get wiped. Most people’s first reaction is just no, not doing that. But once you look at what you get back, it starts to feel more like a prestige system than a punishment. If you walk into the Expedition with 5M stash and coin value, you come out with extra skill points baked into your character, more permanent stash slots to play with, and a set of cosmetics that other players simply will not have. Your new Raider also skips the slow tutorial beats. No crawling through onboarding quests, no drip-feed of locations. Every map and station pops open from day one, so you are straight back into proper runs instead of repeating the early-game hand-holding.
Stacking Value Instead of Hoarding Junk
Once that clicks, your whole approach to the grind changes. Lots of players keep crafting low-tier guns, ammo, or random gear just because it feels like they are “doing something,” but you bleed value that way. You are better off treating your stash like a portfolio. High-risk, high-reward runs into Stella Montis are where things start to move. The Hidden Bunker and the Night Majors areas can be rough, yeah, but you only need a couple of big hits to shift your total. A single Queen Core can be worth a huge chunk of your target on its own, and rare Tempest blueprints do not just look cool, they can push your stash value up fast. If that kind of sweaty PvP hotspot is not your thing, the Dam Battlegrounds still work. You may not walk out with the absolute top-tier loot every time, but explosives and Anvil blueprints stack up nicely without feeling like you are walking into a meat grinder every raid.
Holding Onto Your Best Blueprints
The part that really freaks people out is losing their learned blueprints. You finally get lucky on a Vulcano or a Bobcat and then the reset just knocks it out of your brain. The trick is to treat learned and unlearned blueprints differently before you sign up. Anything you have not clicked on yet can be traded. So players are starting to hand those BPs over to a friend, or to an alt account parked safely away from the Expedition signup. That alt just sits there as a vault. You hit the reset, roll into the new season with your shiny boosted Raider, and then on day one you pull those blueprints back across. It is a bit of juggling, but it turns a full wipe into more of a reshuffle. You are still paying the cost of the reset, just not throwing weeks of rare blueprint luck straight into the bin.
Making The Most Of The Delay
These extra signup days are not just dead time. They are your chance to tidy everything up before the Expedition locks in. Clear out duplicate gear instead of letting it rot in stash space, funnel everything into that 5M target, and focus your runs where the numbers actually move. If you are stuck on rare alloys or just do not have the patience for another hundred late-night raids, some players lean on external help and pick up a few upgrades or resources from places that specialise in trade-ready gear, including BluePrint in ARC Raiders, then use the remaining time to fine-tune their loadouts and routes so they hit the reset not burnt out, but ready to push the new meta from day one.
