Stella Montis Lore: The Sealed Mountain Facility in ARC Raiders

What Stella Montis was

Embark's North Line announcement places Stella Montis in the northern mountains and calls its ruins cold and sterile, a hint at what humanity left behind in its push toward the stars. The Codex says the facility looms silently over the valley below and that its vast scale suggests some grand intent. Its one-line Codex description is blunter: a remote research facility, subject of many wild rumors.

The internal messages Raiders recover show who worked there. Staff sign their emails with departments such as Robotics & Assembly, Medical and Archives, and one of them points out that they are all the way up in the mountains, so why all the security? The Codex files these people as the Stella Montis Researchers and describes them as the best and brightest, aligned around a shared vision. It never says what the vision was. Our Rust Belt page shows where the facility sits among the other maps.

Breaking New Ground: reopening the tunnels

Stella Montis did not open on day one. Embark's North Line post explains that a sprawling tunnel network runs beneath Speranza, and some of it had been sealed off with great effort. The Breaking New Ground event began on November 13, 2025, and asked anyone who had played at least five rounds to donate Basic Materials to the tunnel project. Donations earned Merits, a new event currency, and reconnecting the tunnels triggered Phase II, called Staking Our Claim.

That setup matters for the lore. The route to Stella Montis was closed on purpose, and Speranza had to pool its scrap to dig it out again. Everything Raiders have found since came through that reopened tunnel. The Speranza page covers the tunnels and the city they connect to.

Androids very much like Lance

The first reports out of the facility were about people who were not people. In In My Image, Lance has just treated one of the first Raiders to visit Stella Montis, and she told him she saw others there: androids very much like him. He sends you in to find and search three of them.

Celeste's later quest Someone Else's Shoes goes through encrypted research notes and concludes that the androids around Stella Montis were test subjects as much as they were assistants, connected to something called Project Pathos. Another newer quest, Empathetic Prototypes, has an unnamed speaker horrified at the thought of kin dangling in a shipment crate. Androids were not unique to this facility either: Home to Roost asks you to scan one at the back of the Blue Gate's Traffic Tunnels.

The Lance page covers what all this means for Speranza's medic, and the theory section below keeps the guesses apart from the quest text.

Records and relics: the first Stella Montis quests

After In My Image, the early chain walks you through the building one department at a time. Each quest names a room, so together they work as a rough floor plan:

• Cold Storage wants records or relics from the past, because the reports coming back are unlike anything Speranza has seen. You search a J Kozma Ventures container and bring Rare Books back to Shani.
• Snap and Salvage is Tian Wen's. He leaves the whats and hows to others and wants the tech: photograph the Rovers in an area called the Sandbox, read the papers in the Security Checkpoint room by the Lobby, then bring him a Magnetron and a Flow Controller.
• With a View starts with Shani asking about the streaks of light darting across the sky, which she does not believe are natural. Building her case takes you to the Control Rooms near the Assembly Line and a server switch.
• Movie Night is Apollo trying to calm a city on edge over rumors of the ARC signal, using old movie tapes from the Cultural Archives.
• On Deaf Ears chases rumors of advanced hearing aids developed here, through guest logs on the reception computers, a researcher's lecture notes and the Medical Research computers. It leads on to On the Map at the Spaceport.
• Tian Wen's Stable Housing is about a client who wants a locked safe opened. It is still intact, so whatever is inside has been there since before the Exodus.

MANTIKOR and the researchers

The later Stella Montis quests belong to Shani, and they read like an investigation. In Fragmented Logs she says several parties in Speranza want to dig into the facility's past, which means powering up its old machines and sifting through their data. What comes out includes a thread of internal messages that the Codex files under the Stella Montis Researchers.

The tone is everyday office chatter. Someone mentions what the cafeteria is serving, then asks whether the others saw the MANTIKOR people down in the lobby. A colleague in Medical answers that it is a routine check, officially, warns that they may stop by other sections later, suggests lunch away from the cafeteria and adds that someone named Andrea prefers they speak in person.

Furtive Meetings and Last Entry follow that thread. Last Entry turns up more mentions of MANTIKOR and clear signs of dissent among the researchers, and Shani suspects the tensions eventually escalated. MANTIKOR is the same group whose locker room and security logs Raiders find under the Blue Gate, and the Codex says it cancelled Project Heartwood's research to fund the Exodus.

The hard drive and the Exodus

Celeste's Line in the Sand shows what the facility's data was worth. A Stella Montis hard drive held shutdown documentation, and it also held the transport schedules for some critical Exodus components.

The Codex entry on the Rust Belt Mutiny lists the Stella Montis Researchers as a related entry. It says the shipping routes of key spaceship parts were uncovered among confidential documents, and that a daring heist at Marano train station was the first pinprick of a brewing mutiny. The Project Heartwood entry adds that Tian Wen suspects countless forgotten research projects still sit in the vaults and safes of Stella Montis. Our Exodus page follows the mutiny to the Spaceport and the coast.

Taken together, the quests describe a facility whose staff had doubts, whose security was heavy and whose files touched the Exodus supply chain. They stop short of saying what Stella Montis actually built.

ARC at Stella Montis

The facility's signature machine is the Shredder. Embark's North Line post said it would first appear in Stella Montis, and the Codex says that when it was first met at the facility it left a trail of downed Raiders. The few who made it back named it, and the Codex jokes that the name was literal rather than clever.

Shredders have since spread to the other maps under certain conditions, starting with the Flashpoint update in March 2026. Nothing Ventured, a quest that ends with deliveries to Apollo, also has an optional objective to destroy a Bastion on Stella Montis, and Night Raid can darken its corridors.

Theories: who sealed Stella Montis, and why (theory)

None of this is confirmed by the game.

The Codex says the last occupants seemingly sealed the facility themselves, and the tunnels from Speranza had been closed off with great effort. Read next to the shutdown documentation on the hard drive, one interpretation is that the closure was planned, an orderly shutdown rather than a flight. Another reading leans on the dissent in the researchers' messages and MANTIKOR's presence in the lobby. The quests support both and settle neither.

The most popular theory is about Lance. Players have long wondered whether he is one of the Stella Montis androids, damaged and missing his memories, and our Lance analysis walks through the case. In My Image and Project Pathos make the idea easy to like, but no quest ties Lance to a specific facility.

The map description raises one more question. If Stella Montis was a last bulwark for humanity's preservation, what exactly was it preserving, and for whom? The theories page gathers the wider arguments.

What is Stella Montis in ARC Raiders?

Stella Montis is an abandoned research facility carved into the northern mountains, sealed by its last occupants and better preserved than the lower Rust Belt. Embark added it as a map with the North Line update in November 2025.

Who sealed Stella Montis?

The Codex says its last occupants seemingly sealed it away from the world. The game has not said who they were or why they did it, though recovered messages show researchers uneasy under MANTIKOR security.

Is Lance from Stella Montis?

That is unconfirmed. Lance's In My Image quest finds androids at Stella Montis that look very much like him, and later notes say they were test subjects under Project Pathos, but no quest says Lance came from there.

When was Stella Montis added to ARC Raiders?

It arrived with the North Line update in November 2025. The Breaking New Ground community event began on November 13, and the map opened once players had restored the tunnels from Speranza.