The Expedition system in Arc Raiders is the game's take on prestige resets. It's entirely optional, but once you sign up during a departure window, there's no going back. Your Raider leaves the Rust Belt permanently, most of your progress gets wiped, and you start fresh with a new character — plus a handful of permanent and temporary bonuses that wouldn't be available otherwise.
Quick answer: When you sign up for an Expedition during the departure window, you are committing your Raider to leave on departure day. The reset does not happen immediately upon signing up — everyone departs at the same moment globally. Your stash and coin value at the time of departure determines how many bonus skill points your next Raider receives.
How the sign-up process works
Before you can even sign up, you need to complete all five construction stages of the Expedition Project. This is a multi-week process that requires you to donate crafting materials, components, and coin-value items to build a caravan. You must be at least level 20 to start, and once materials are committed to the project, they cannot be retrieved.
After finishing every stage, a departure window opens for roughly five days. For the most recent Expedition cycle, sign-ups opened on February 25, 2026, with departure on March 1, 2026. During that window, you navigate to the Projects tab on the Raiders screen and click "Sign up." That action is final — you cannot undo it.
Critically, signing up does not trigger the reset right away. Every player who registered departs simultaneously when the window closes. The exact moment is the same for all time zones, so it might land at midnight for some players and early morning for others depending on region.
What you need to maintain after signing up
Your stash and coin value are not locked in at the moment you sign up. They are evaluated when the departure actually happens. That means you need to maintain your target value through departure day. If you sign up with 3 million coins' worth of stash value but then spend heavily before departure, your bonus skill points will be calculated on whatever remains.
Each 600,000 coins of combined stash and coin value earns one bonus skill point, up to a maximum of five skill points at 3,000,000. This value includes both the sell price of items sitting in your stash and any coins in your wallet.
The stash value only affects skill points. Other permanent rewards, like extra stash slots and exclusive cosmetics are granted to everyone who completes the Expedition regardless of how much wealth they hold at departure.
Everything you lose on departure
Once your Raider departs, a significant chunk of your account resets. You lose all inventory items, blueprints, coins, stash upgrade progress, your player level and acquired skill points, Raider Den progress, Workshop upgrade progress, and all quest progress. Your equipped loadout is included in this wipe — some players have reported their loadout disappearing from their account immediately upon signing up, though inventory items in the stash remained until departure day.
Blueprints are a particularly painful loss. There is no way to preserve them through an Expedition unless you trade them to a friend who is not departing. Since everyone who signs up leaves at the same time, two friends cannot swap blueprints back and forth if both are going. You would need a third party — someone skipping the Expedition — to hold items for you.
Everything you keep
Not everything disappears. The following persist across Expeditions:
- Unlocked maps and workshop stations
- Codex entries
- Raider Tokens and Cred
- Raider Decks progress
- Active leaderboard positions
- Trials progress
- All cosmetics
- Personal event progress
- Trophy Display Project progress
- Bonus skill points and stash slots earned from previous Expeditions
Merits are also retained. Essentially, anything tied to your account's meta-progression or real-money purchases survives the reset.
Permanent rewards from completing an Expedition
Each completed Expedition grants a set of permanent unlocks that scale based on how many Expeditions you've finished. The rewards are tied to your personal Expedition count, not to a specific calendar window. A player doing their first Expedition in six months will receive the same first-Expedition rewards as someone who departed in December 2025.
| Expedition | Permanent Rewards |
|---|---|
| 1st | The Patchwork Raider outfit, Scrappy Janitor Cap, Expedition 1 Indicator icon, +12 stash slots, up to 5 bonus skill points |
| 2nd | Patchwork Raider outfit (evolved, with 4 toggles and 2 color options), new Scrappy cosmetic, Expedition 2 Indicator icon, +12 additional stash slots (24 total), up to 5 more bonus skill points |
Players who have completed both Expeditions and maximized their stash value each time can reach up to 85 total skill points — 75 from the normal level cap plus 10 from Expedition bonuses.
Temporary buffs and consecutive departures
On top of permanent rewards, each Expedition grants temporary buffs that last until the next Expedition departs. These stack with consecutive completions, up to three times, but reset entirely if you skip a departure window.
| Buff | After 1st Expedition | After 2nd Expedition | Max (3 consecutive) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Repair value increase | 60% | 70% | Up to 30% base per completion |
| XP boost | 5% | 10% | 15% |
| Scrappy material bonus | 6% | 12% | 18% |
Note that the repair buff is calculated on top of the base 50% repair value, not the item's full durability. The effective durability gain is lower than the percentage might suggest. For example, a 10% repair buff on a weapon with 130 max durability adds roughly 6.5 points on top of the base 65-point repair, not 13.
The catch-up mechanic for missed skill points
Embark Studios introduced a catch-up system for the second Expedition onward. If you departed on a previous Expedition but didn't accumulate enough stash value to earn all five skill points, you can reclaim the missing ones during your next Expedition at a discounted rate.
For the second Expedition, each missed skill point from the first Expedition costs only 300,000 in stash value instead of the standard 600,000. However, coins are applied to the current Expedition's skill points first. You must max out the current cycle's five points before any surplus contributes toward catching up on previously missed ones.
You cannot reclaim skill points for Expeditions you did not participate in at all. The catch-up only applies to Expeditions where you signed up and departed but fell short of the value threshold.
What happens if you don't finish the project or skip a window
If you've partially completed the Expedition Project but the departure window closes without you signing up, your construction progress is preserved. You can pick up where you left off during the next cycle. However, you will not receive any temporary buffs for that period, and any consecutive buff stacks you had will reset.
The Expedition system runs on roughly an eight-week schedule, with about 60 days to gather resources and build the caravan, followed by a five-to-seven-day departure window. Missing a window isn't catastrophic for permanent rewards — those will still be available whenever you eventually depart — but it does interrupt your temporary buff chain.
The Expedition is a high-commitment decision that fundamentally resets your gameplay loop. For players who enjoy the early-game grind and want the mechanical edge of extra skill points and stash space, it's a compelling trade. For those who'd rather keep their blueprints and built-up stash, skipping is perfectly viable — the base 75 skill points and 260 stash slots are more than enough to stay competitive. Embark has indicated plans to continue refining the system, so requirements and rewards may shift in future cycles.