Arc Raiders is dense. That happens to be part of why I love it so much. But there’s no way around it: There’s a lot of stuff to keep track of in this game, from craftable materials, to weapon mods, to the weapons themselves, not to mention quick use items and your augments and shields. It feels endless sometimes–especially given that we so often interface with them one item at a time while we pick ‘em outta random bins or lockers we’ve broken into, or scavenge them from the innards of mechanical menaces we’ve shot down (or biological ones).
That’s where cheat sheets and other resources come in. Arc Raiders has been out for a couple of weeks and already there are a bunch of fantastic user-made tools out there.
Whether your preference is for images, spreadsheets, or websites, I’ve tracked down a few impressive and wildly useful resources to help you break down the game. Some of these address very specific parts of the sandbox of Arc Raiders’ toys, while others are more comprehensive. Let’s take a look.
Arc Raiders Database: The GOAT
Let’s kick things off with what I think is currently the best third-party resource for looking up info and tracking your progress as you collect your way to supremacy. Enter Arc Raiders Database. Ardb.tools really is a one-stop shop for details on just about any item, map, and even enemy you’d need information about. Looking for a specific resource? Each item gets its own page, complete with all the info you need including locations on each map where you might be likely to find it. You can also directly compare the stats of guns and their various upgrade tiers. It rocks.
There’s not much else I can say about it other than to encourage you to head on over and start clicking around. The tricky thing with these websites is that they’re only as good as their information is relevant, and as a live-service game, Arc Raiders is a moving target for these kinds of projects. But for now at least,
this is perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough third-party resource for Arc Raiders thus far, and I also think its UI is very well done. Bookmark it; let it live on a second screen, or use it on your smartphone.
A more comprehensive weapon breakdown
As I said in my weapons overview, Arc Raiders is a tricky game to figure out metas for. There are so many ways to enter and leave a match, and so many ways to get into or out of trouble, that simple DPS or TTK stats only give you one part of the picture of an Arc Raiders gun battle.
But if you want a deep dive, all the way down to headshot multipliers and how many shots it takes to kill someone, have a gander at the Anvil Community’s Weapon Metrics spreadsheet.
As an .xlsx, you can even download the spreadsheet. Clearly, it will work better in Excel or Microsoft’s live office tools. I’ve been able to download it and add it to my Google Drive, and it seems to work alright. The tabs on the bottom of the page refer to shield strength, so it will recalculate TTKs based on what your target is potentially wearing.
This information might be wildly subject to change given Arc Raiders’ live-service nature, but for now, it’s one of the only ways to drill down to specifics such as headshot multiplayers and specific numbers of shots-to-kill.
Just the crafting resources
Two resources stood out to me when considering a cheat sheet focused entirely on resources (in addition to the excellent PDF/PNG cheat sheet I shouted out in my inventory management guide).
First up is the humbly named “Scrap” Google spreadsheet, created by Redditor s1munsayz. This is a very simple spreadsheet laying out all of the crafting resources you can recover, with a simple layout of what they can be recycled/salvaged into. Resources like ARDB are amazing, but a straightforward spreadsheet is sometimes a better visual learning aid.
Be sure to make your own copy in your Google Drive to use its search functions appropriately.
I also want to shout out Redditor Legal_Squash_195’s “Inventory Manager,” a standalone Python app you can download from Github. You’ll need to have Python installed on your machine to get it to work, but it’s a handy app–and if you’re like me and enjoy a good standalone, community-created piece of software, Inventory Manager is pretty awesome.
Honorable mention: arcraiders.wiki
While I think ARDB takes the cake with its vast amount of options, arcraiders.wiki was an early resource for me and it remains a solid way to sort through and look up the nature of various crafting materials, weapons, enemies, and maps.
Time will tell how useful these resources remain over time, especially as Arc Raiders continues to get updates and potential changes to its meta math under the hood. For now, bookmark, download, do whatever you need to, because having these resources at the ready dramatically improves the overall flow of a healthy session of Arc Raiders.
