ARC Raiders Materials and Crafting Items: How to Find Them
How materials work in ARC Raiders, the items players ask about most, and why exact spawn locations are not something any official source publishes.
Applies to: ARC Raiders crafting materials and how they are found, checked on October 15, 2026, with search-demand items named but spawn data kept unconfirmed
Quick answer
ARC Raiders materials are looted from containers and the environment rather than bought outright, and the game groups them by how you obtain them: resources from the surface, parts salvaged from destroyed ARC machines, and items you can recycle, trade with Traders, or turn in for quests and upgrades. The items players search for most include Planks, Sheet Metal, Insulation Roll, Epoxy Bucket, Mini Pump, Hand Drill, Steel Cable, Cooling Coils and Industrial Battery, plus ARC parts such as Bully Fragmenter and Frigate Inductor. Exact per-run spawn locations are not published by Embark Studios and shift with map conditions, so this page explains how to search rather than promising a fixed spot.
At a glance
In ARC Raiders, materials are scavenged rather than bought. You loot them from containers and the environment on the surface, salvage them from destroyed ARC machines, and sometimes trade for them with Traders in Speranza. If you search for a specific item — "where to find sheet metal", "where to find an epoxy bucket" — the honest answer is that ARC Raiders does not publish fixed spawn locations, and the best route is usually a Trader or a targeted loot run, not one marked spot on one map.
How materials work
Materials fall into a few broad kinds, each with its own route to your stash:
| Kind | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Surface resources | Looted from containers and fixed scavenging points as you move through a map. |
| ARC parts | Salvaged from destroyed ARC machines — different units drop different components. |
| Recycled items | Broken-down gear and trinkets converted into materials at your base. |
| Traded items | Bought from Traders, including a barter Trader who exchanges goods rather than coins. |
| Quest and upgrade hand-ins | Some items exist mainly to be handed to a Trader for a quest or a base upgrade. |
Items players ask about
These are the materials that show up most in search, based on the keyword data behind this site. They are listed as names to recognise, not as locations.
- Building materials: Planks, Sheet Metal, Steel Cable, Cooling Coils, Radial Press
- Mechanical and electrical items: Hand Drill, Mini Pump, Insulation Roll, Epoxy Bucket, Industrial Battery, Motors, Toasters, Calculators
- Consumables and scavenged objects: Mushrooms, Bicycle Pump, Humidifiers, Headphones, a Breathtaking Snow Globe
- ARC parts and key items: Bully Fragmenter, Frigate Inductor, Emperor Modulator, Sentinel Firing Core, Surveyor Vault, Ion Sputter and a Frequency Modulation Box
Separately, some things people search as "quests" are actually items or objectives — the guidance is to check the in-game entry for the thing you are hunting, and to treat "where to find" as a scavenging problem rather than a fixed coordinate.
How to find a specific item
- Ask the Traders first. Several Traders stock or barter for common materials, and it is often faster to trade for a handful of planks than to farm them. Unlocking the Outpost's Trader flow opens this up further.
- Read the item, not the map. The game tells you what an item is for — a base upgrade, a quest hand-in, a blueprint. That tells you whether you need one or a stack.
- Use the right loot pool. Field crates and loot containers on the surface are the general source; some materials skew toward certain maps or conditions, which is why a run during the right condition beats a fixed route.
- Keep it in your Safe Pocket. Rare finds like some items and blueprints survive only if they are in the slot that persists on death.
What is not published
- Per-item spawn maps. Not published by Embark Studios; community maps exist but are player-made and shift with patches.
- Drop rates. No official rates for materials or ARC parts.
- A single "all materials" list. The item set grows and changes with updates.
Sources and review scope
- Embark Studios — ARC Raiders official site — confirms the loot-and-extract, crafting-between-raids loop and the Trader base system.
- Embark Studios — Map Conditions — the reason a material route is not fixed: the condition schedule rotates hourly.
- ARC Raiders Wiki — Items (community-run) — used as a lead for item names; labelled third-party, and its drop notes are player-recorded.
Checked on October 15, 2026. This page deliberately does not attach a location to each item: those locations are not officially documented, and inventing them would be guesswork. Item names are given so a player can recognise what they are hunting, with the search method framed around Traders, loot pools and map conditions.
Checked on October 15, 2026 against the Steam store listing and the Steam Web API app-details, current-players, review-summary and news endpoints for ARC Raiders, and Embark Studios' own posts on arcraiders.com. Live figures such as the concurrent-player count and the review total are timestamped snapshots that keep moving and are labelled as such. Game-internal details that Embark Studios has not published come from the community-run ARC Raiders Wiki and are labelled third-party, not official. Player-tested values are marked as such. Anything neither source states is written as unconfirmed rather than guessed.
Not independently play-tested. This is not a claim that every platform or game version was tested. Source review: Oct 15, 2026.
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