ARC Raiders Outpost Guide - Frozen Trail Update

ARC Raiders Outpost Quick Summary:

• Outpost unlocks through the Sheltered Retreat Project at level 18.
• The Project has three stages: take a photo, gather materials, and secure the construction site.
• Unlocking the Outpost also gives you access to the Research Workstation.
• You can expand your base with additional Modules, which are basically new rooms.
• Furniture Designs work like Blueprints, with 100 Designs added in Frozen Trail.

A new season is just around the corner, and with character reset, all your blueprints are gone. You know what that means. It's time to get your favorite ARC Raiders Blueprints back.

 

 

 

ARC Raiders Outpost Explained

So what’s an Outpost? As I see it, it’s an early stage of ARC Raiders bringing a more tangible feel to the game. If you played it, then you know you can’t walk around Speranza, and all you can do is sit and observe the beautifully designed spaces from the main menu. Unfortunately, this doesn’t change with Outpost, yet. The team behind ARC Raiders said that one of their goals in the future is to make this space walkable, but for now it’s kinda like a live wallpaper you can decorate with various stuff you find in-game. If this seems a bit underwhelming, I also think so. Still, Outpost is not purely cosmetic. It introduces the new Research Workstation, which is the main reason to even build an Outpost, at least for me. Don’t get me wrong, I love decorating my apartment, but this new bench is gonna be your saving grace in the endgame content, which is Frigate. 

Completing the first Outpost step isn’t the end of it, though. You can make the base bigger by adding Modules and customize each room with furniture. Scrappy even hangs out there, although, for some reason, you still can’t pet him. Here are the things you can do in your Outpost:

Outpost Feature	What It Does
Modules	Expand the Outpost with additional rooms
Furniture Designs	Unlock new craftable furniture and decorate your Outpost with it
Research Workstation	Research selected weapons, items, and other things
Weapon Amplification	Unlock Quality V upgrades after fully upgrading Research
Trinket Displays	Display some of the random junk you bring back to Speranza

The Outpost is pretty raw for now. I guess the developers weren’t confident that the ton of content provided in Frozen Trail is somehow not enough. You can’t freely walk around it or invite other players into your base yet, and in their own words, this is basically the beginning of the feature rather than its final version. Personally, I think being able to walk around and invite squadmates would make the whole thing feel far more useful and create a ton of hype, but we’ll see where they take it. 

How to Unlock an Outpost in ARC Raiders

You don’t get the Outpost automatically after installing Frozen Trail. It’s not gonna take you long to develop it, though. Once you reach level 18, you can start the Sheltered Retreat Project, which has three stages and eventually establishes your base Topside. It’s quite easy compared to some of the older Projects, and you can view the later stages in advance, so I recommend gathering the required materials as you aim to finish the first objective. Here’s how to unlock an Outpost in ARC Raiders:

• Snap a picture on Camera during the first step
• Get 3 Planks, 5 Sheet Metal, 10 ARC Alloy, and 3 Advanced Electrical Components for step 2
• Do damage to ARCs for step 3

This is only the first stage of creating an Outpost. You won’t get all the cool stuff immediately, just making sure you understand that. Now let me go over each step in more detail. 

Step 1: Take a Picture at Ruined Homestead

The first stage is called Research Topside Living Conditions. You need to go to Ruined Homestead on Blue Gate and take a photo of any farmland house there. Ruined Homestead is in the southern part of Blue Gate, near Olive Grove, and any of the farm buildings will do. Unlike older photo quests, you now need an actual Camera to snap a picture. No more finding the right spot the devs intended you to find. You automatically get one from Shani as a quest item. Later, once you get the Camera Blueprint as a reward for finishing this first step, you’ll be able to craft the Camera with:

• 8 Plastic Parts
• 1 Wire

Equip the Camera once you reach the Homestead, aim at one of the houses, and take the shot. Watch out for a Rocketeer or a Bombardier that frequently patrol this area.

Step 2: Gather Building Materials

The second stage is your standard gathering quest. You’re building a house, so Celeste has decided that you’re also the construction supplier now. You need to hand in four types of materials:

• 3 Planks
• 5 Sheet Metal
• 10 ARC Alloy
• 3 Advanced Electrical Components

You can get the first 2 from Celeste if you have enough coins. The latter 2 can only be looted. Completing this stage also gives you the Red Light Stick Blueprint.

Step 3: Safeguard the Building Site

The final stage is Safeguard the Building Site. Instead of bringing more building materials, you need to deal damage to ARC machines so construction can continue without the workers getting turned into paste. You need to:

1. Do 800 damage to Flying ARCs
2. Do 400 damage to Bully

The first part is really simple, but finding Bully on Pendola Pass is harder than it seems. In four of the matches that I’ve managed to play so far, he only appeared twice, and only when there was a shootout with another. When I ran solo, I found it next to the Railyard. When I was in a group, it was tucked away on the northernmost spawn on the map. Finishing the last step completes the Sheltered Retreat Project and opens your Outpost. You also receive a Decorative Chair, 15 Planks, and 5 Durable Cloth, so you immediately have something to put into your new house rather than staring at completely empty rooms.

ARC Raiders Research Workstation Explained

The Research Workstation is the most important Outpost feature because it actually affects progression outside of decorating your house. You gain access to Research when you unlock the Outpost, and from there you can upgrade the Workstation to open more advanced research. The main idea is to give you a way to work toward specific unlocks instead of praying that the Blueprint you want randomly drops after another 50 raids. Another important feature of the Research Workstation is the Weapon Amplification, but it’s already described in this article pretty thoroughly, so I won’t talk much about it here. Just know that it’s an extremely important late-game system. The Research Workstation works roughly like this:

1. Find items Topside that contain Research Points
2. Successfully bring them back from a raid
3. Go to the Research Workstation
4. Choose which available research you want to pursue
5. Spend the required Research Points and complete any additional objectives or material requirements
6. Unlock the corresponding research reward

This doesn’t completely replace Blueprints. You can still find them normally, and not every rare or endgame Blueprint is necessarily available through Research. The point is that you now have some control over progression instead of having absolutely no option when RNG refuses to give you the thing you need. Some Research projects also have more than a Research Point requirement. Weapon research, for instance, requires specific materials and an objective involving actually dealing damage with the weapon, so simply hoarding thousands of Research Points won’t work for everything. 

 

 

ARC Raiders Outpost Modules Explained

Modules sound much more complicated than they actually are. After finishing the Sheltered Retreat Project, you only get the base room, and then you can spend crafting materials to expand your Outpost with additional Modules. Afaik, they don’t give any passive bonuses and are simply there for you to have more space for your furniture designs. The progression of your Outpost looks like this:

1. Complete Sheltered Retreat
2. Unlock the base Outpost room
3. Gather the materials required for an expansion
4. Construct a new Module
5. Decorate the additional room with furniture

If you want to get more furniture designs, upgrading the Outpost is essential. Of the 100 Furniture Designs added with Frozen Trail, 22 are unlocked through Outpost upgrades, so building out the base gives you more things to put inside it rather than just increasing the amount of empty floor you own. Don’t confuse Modules with the Research Workstation, though. Research becomes available once the Outpost is unlocked and has its own upgrades. Modules are mainly there to physically expand your personal space, while Research is the functional progression part.

 

 

ARC Raiders Furniture Designs

If you were wondering where you will get furniture to decorate your Outpost, the answer is simple. Furniture designs are the newest addition to the game, and they’re basically Blueprints for the Outpost. Find one, bring it back to Speranza, learn it, and now it’s available for crafting once you have the resources. Some furniture also lets you display trinkets you find Topside, so now you have more control over them instead of watching rubber duckies pile up in the Raider tab of the main menu. Frozen Trail adds 100 Furniture Designs in total:

Furniture Design Source	Amount
Found Topside	73
Outpost Upgrades	22
Frozen Trail Pass	4
Collector Set DLC	1
Total	100

Most of the collection is available through normal gameplay, which I like. There are only five Designs tied to the Pass or DLC, while the other 95 come from actually playing and upgrading your Outpost. Once you’ve learned a Design, open the Outpost decorating menu, choose an available furniture slot, and craft/place whatever fits there. The current version is more akin to the Sims decoration system than the base you can walk around, but at least Designs give you another reason to check random loot while Topside.

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