Where Do ARC Come From? The ARC Raiders Origin Mystery

What is confirmed about where ARC come from

Embark's official world overview says machines started falling from the sky just as civilization began to recover, generations after the environmental collapse. The Codex gets more specific. Its entry on ARC says people Topside have always called the machines by that name, after the arced shapes they show on radar screens when they come in from orbit, and it refers to them as the Raiders' orbital foes.

Two machine types show the traffic runs both ways. The Codex says ARC Probes are sent down regularly, collect soil samples and data, and return to orbit afterward. In Mixed Signals, Shani notices that Surveyors seem to be transmitting data back into orbit and asks you to break one open.

That is where certainty stops. The Steam page says ARC's origins remain a mystery. When Embark changed its update schedule in May 2026, it listed exploring the origin of ARC as part of Frozen Trail and said the update would give Raiders the chance to begin uncovering it.

What ARC does on Earth

The game describes ARC's activity in industrial terms. According to the Codex, ARC has been seen probing the soil in great numbers before harvesting resources with brutal efficiency, and nobody knows which resources the Probes are looking for. Most people, it adds, hope the answer cannot be found in the Rust Belt.

Then there is the Harvester. Embark's pre-launch guide describes the Queen furiously defending it and calls it a structure with unknown purpose, and the Codex says the few Raiders who got inside reported a layered defense system. Shani's Down to Earth has Raiders crack open crates dropped by malfunctioning Probes to work out what ARC is after.

ARC also changes. The Codex calls the First Wave machines rudimentary and the current generation far more refined in tactics and design, and says it is widely believed that ARC's security forces keep refining their designs as threats change. The bestiary backs that up: most content updates since launch have added machines, from the Matriarch to Frozen Trail's Bully, Skulker and Hydra.

What ARC wreckage tells Speranza

Embark calls Shani Speranza's resident ARC expert, and a lot of her work is taking machines apart. In Dormant Barons she sends Raiders into a First Wave husk because its internals might hold the answer to keeping ARC at bay. Apollo is blunter in What Goes Around: Speranza cannot build ARC tech from scratch, only tinker with the pieces Raiders salvage.

Item text tells the same story. Amplification Modules are described as advanced ARC technology, Unknown ARC Circuitry is unfamiliar in both layout and design, and the Codex credits inventors across Toledo with turning salvaged ARC parts into energy shields and improvised grenades. The survivors of 2180 can reuse ARC technology but cannot make it, so whoever designed ARC was far ahead of anyone alive today. The game has not said who that was.

The clues each update has added

Every few months the game points at the sky again. These are the clues worth knowing, roughly in the order they arrived.

• The early quests revolve around a signal Speranza has never picked up before. Celeste raises it in A Bad Feeling, and Shani later suspects it is tied to what the Surveyors send to orbit.
• Shani has seen streaks of light darting across the skies and does not believe they are natural, which kicks off her quest With a View.
• In Flashpoint, Celeste's radar flooded with unknown signatures, and the ARC Assessor made a controlled landing escorted by ARC patrols Embark called unprecedented.
• Riven Tides brought the ARC Turbine, which drifts across the Rust Belt doing something that, by Embark's own admission, nobody quite understands.
• Frozen Trail revealed that ARC has Emperors, plural, and that one has fallen at Pendola Pass. The Emperor Beacon item carries a copy of an Emperor's identifier signal and calls in Harvester Payloads, a hint that Emperors help run ARC's supply chain.
• ARC answered the fall by sending the Frigate, one of its largest vessels. Frigate Diagnostic Nodes found in its trail carry electromagnetic signatures that turn out to be partially decipherable.

Frozen Trail's open thread

The new quests push further. One says flatly that the Emperor did not just trip and fall: it was brought down, and the speaker has a leading theory about how. Another picks up signals from far beyond the Rust Belt as ARC swarms the wreck. A third looks at a contraption found at the Observatory whose signature is undeniably ARC's. None of them says yet who or what is on the other end.

What is still unknown about ARC

Frozen Trail launched on October 8, 2026, and it is the first update Embark tied directly to these questions, so expect answers to come through its quests. We will update this page as they do.

For now, the open questions are the big ones.

• Nobody in the game names who built ARC, and Embark has not either.
• It is unclear whether anything controls ARC or whether the machines run themselves. The Codex only says their security forces are believed to refine their designs over time.
• What ARC is harvesting, and why it arrived just as the survivors of the Collapse were getting back on their feet, has not been explained.
• Nothing official links ARC to the Exodus. The overlap between people leaving for space and machines arriving from orbit is a theory, and our Exodus page treats it as one.

Where do the ARC come from in ARC Raiders?

From orbit, as far as anyone in the game can tell. The Codex says ARC are named for the arced shapes they make on radar as they come in from orbit, and Probes return to orbit after sampling the soil. Who sends them is officially a mystery.

Are the ARC aliens?

The game has not said. Nothing official calls ARC alien, man-made or anything else, and the Steam page describes their origins as a mystery.

Did humans create ARC?

No official source says so. Some players think the people who left in the Exodus built ARC, but that theory rests on timing and the orbit clue, not on any statement in the game.

Does Frozen Trail reveal where ARC come from?

It starts to. Embark said Frozen Trail would let Raiders begin uncovering what ARC are and where they come from. So far it adds the fallen Emperor, the Frigate and new signal clues, without a full answer.