ARC Raiders Blueprint & Loot Farming Guide (2026): Farm Smarter

The fastest way to farm blueprints and high-tier loot in ARC Raiders is to route the right rooms and weapon-case spawns instead of grabbing every container you pass. Blueprints unlock permanent crafting for the meta guns everyone wants, so where you loot matters far more than how much you loot. Here's an honest, up-to-date 2026 breakdown of how the loot economy actually works, where to farm, and how to stop dying with a full backpack.

Why blueprints are the loot that actually matters

Most of what you scoop up in a raid is filler. The stuff that changes your account is blueprints. Blueprints consistently rank as the most valuable discovery, providing permanent crafting access, and a single blueprint unlock might enable weapon crafts worth hundreds of thousands of credits over a player's lifespan.

That's the whole reason blueprint farming is worth building a strategy around. As of 2026, the game leans hard on this system: ARC Raiders has 24 weapons, and 17 of them require blueprints. In other words, most of the arsenal is locked behind drops you have to find, buy, or trade for.

The core mindset shift: you can't control which blueprint drops, but you can absolutely control how many high-tier containers you open per run. Optimize the inputs, and the good rolls follow over time.

Farm locations, not containers

The single biggest efficiency upgrade is thinking in routes. As one long-running guide puts it, the most useful way to think about rare loot in ARC Raiders is to farm locations, not just containers — that one adjustment makes the grind far more efficient.

The reason is that high-tier rooms pull from better loot pools. Breach rooms, key rooms, puzzle rooms, and parkour-only entries always pull from higher loot tiers. Prioritizing those over random drawers is where the real gains are. On top of that, weapon case spawns have the strongest blueprint rates in the game, so hit every one you pass — even low-percent spawns are worth checking.

Where to start? Community testing keeps pointing to the same map. If you only want the practical answer, start with Buried City, then move to Spaceport. For new and solo Raiders especially, the Buried City is the single best farming location, and the Space Travel Tower is the most loot-dense point of interest there, packing hundreds of drawers, lockers, and containers across six floors.

Events and modifiers that stack value

• Locked Gate (The Blue Gate): A four-code event with serious payoff. The Locked Gate event requires four security codes from Ancient Fort, Raider's Refuge, Reinforced Reception, and Pilgrim's Peak, and yields the Bobcat blueprint underground. Just remember the loot isn't only behind the gate — the real value is the surrounding houses, village buildings, lockers, ammo boxes, and underground rooms, which can all produce serious loot.
• Night Raids: Higher risk, higher reward. Night Raids shouldn't be ignored — you get significantly better loot from high-tier areas, including more keys, which you can then take into other runs.
• Guaranteed weapon blueprints: If you want a reliable path to specific guns, there's an exception to the random drops. Blueprints drop randomly, with the only exception being the Harvester event, where you are guaranteed to find the Jupiter or Equalizer blueprint.

Which guns are worth farming toward in 2026

Before you sink hours into a grind, aim it at weapons that are actually good right now. The meta shifted through the spring patches, so here's roughly where things stand.

• The best guns right now are the Anvil and the buffed Bettina — both S-tier after Patch 1.26.0. The Anvil wins on raw versatility; the Bettina wins on armor damage and is the top pick for boss fights.
• The Anvil earns its reputation on flexibility. It's absurdly strong for how early and cheaply it can be crafted — a hand cannon that hits almost as hard as top-tier rifles while staying lightweight, with strong ARC armor penetration and excellent handling.
• Don't sleep on the free option. The Ferro is a strong budget marksman rifle with massive damage that's laughably cheap to craft (5 metal, 2 rubber) — if you want easy headshots, it's your go-to. It needs no blueprint at all, which makes it the perfect gun to run while you farm blueprints for everything else.

One caveat worth stating plainly: tier lists disagree at the margins, and Embark keeps tuning. Treat these picks as a snapshot, not gospel, and double-check the current patch before committing coins.

Loot discipline: extract more, lose less

All the routing in the world means nothing if you die with the goods. The math is brutal but simple: three successful ten-minute runs where you keep 100% of your loot beat one thirty-minute expedition where extraction fails and everything is lost.

A few habits that separate consistent farmers from people who feed the lobby:

• Always use the safe pocket for the important stuff. Any key opens a door to a room with rare loot, so no matter how risky finding that door is, it's always worth putting a key into a safe slot.
• Recycle, don't hoard. If you're not after specific rare items, recycle them into basic materials, which stack up to 50 — saving inventory space and letting you loot more.
• Play solo for farming runs. Farm loot in solos: people are generally much friendlier in solos than squads, which means you stand a better chance of getting out with your loot.
• Plan your exit first. For solo runners especially, the golden rules are to stay mobile, listen more than you engage, and always plan your extraction before you start looting — a safe exit route is worth more than one extra loot container — and travel light, extract often.

And know when to leave. Once you have multiple blueprints, rare loot, or an overweight backpack, leave — if you already have a strong haul, every extra minute is a risk.

Farming vs. skipping the grind

Here's the honest trade-off. Blueprint farming is a genuine time sink; drops are random, and even a good route only improves your odds, not your guarantees. If you enjoy the loop, the systems above will make every hour count. If you'd rather spend your limited playtime actually fighting and extracting with a stacked loadout instead of dumpster-diving for RNG, that's exactly where a service comes in.

That's what we do at AstroBoost — fast, secure help getting the blueprints, materials, and meta weapons you want without the dozens of hours of grinding. No fake guarantees, no magic "ban-proof" claims: just a straightforward way to skip the tedious parts.

Want to stop chasing RNG and start extracting with the guns everyone else is farming for? Check out our full lineup on the ARC Raiders services page and lock in your loadout today.