Arc Raiders’ latest update does something most games only joke about: it sets exploiters on fire.
With update 1.4.0, Embark Studios has wired every locked loot room with flamethrower traps. Players who clip through a locked door without the correct keycard are now dropped into what is effectively an oven, burned down in seconds while the loot remains untouched. The change lands alongside a fix for a powerful shotgun exploit and some smaller quality tweaks.
What the locked door exploit was doing to Arc Raiders
Locked rooms are one of the main ways Arc Raiders hands out high‑tier gear. Each major location – Dam Battlegrounds, Buried City, Spaceport, Blue Gate, Stella Montis – scatters rooms that can only be opened with specific keycards or, in a few edge cases, rare materials. Keys are random drops from drawers, containers, and supply drops, so access is meant to be limited and risky.
Players found workarounds. The most common was simple body physics abuse:
- In squads, one player sprinted into a locked door while a teammate pushed from behind, forcing them through the geometry.
- In solos, items like the Barricade Kit or Noisemaker could be placed and used to shove a character through walls or door frames.
Once someone phased into the room, they could unlock it “from the inside” and let the whole squad in, bypassing the need for a keycard. That undercut the entire risk‑reward loop around keys, and on some maps effectively turned rare loot rooms into free loot crates for anyone willing to exploit collision bugs.
How the flamethrower “very hot fix” works
Rather than immediately re‑engineering collision on every suspect doorway, Embark added what the patch notes call “exploit mitigation mechanisms” to all locked rooms on all maps. In practice, those mechanisms are flamethrowers.
Players can still perform the glitchy pushes and clips into locked rooms if they insist. The difference now is what’s waiting on the other side:
| Action | Result after update 1.4.0 |
|---|---|
| Enter locked room with correct keycard | Room behaves normally, loot is available, no automatic fire trap |
| Clip or shove through locked door without a key | Multiple flamethrowers trigger, room fills with fire, player is quickly killed |
| Try to escape after glitching inside | No reliable exit; the player is effectively trapped with the flames |
The important detail is that the loot is not destroyed. The fire nukes the intruder but leaves the crates and their gear intact. When someone later unlocks the door properly, they’ll find:
- The original room loot, and
- The corpse and inventory of whoever tried to glitch their way in.
That turns the exploit into an in‑world punishment. Cheaters lose everything they brought into the raid. Legitimate key users get a bonus loot pile for following the intended rules.
Why Embark stayed playful instead of just blocking the glitch
On a purely technical level, Embark’s team has plenty of experience solving collision issues; Arc Raiders is full of complex vertical spaces and moving machines. The studio elected to layer a systemic penalty on top of the bug rather than removing every possible clip path outright.
There are a few practical reasons that approach fits an extraction shooter:
- Exploits are a moving target. Even if one doorway clip is solved, players tend to find another interaction or object stack that breaks geometry. A standing fire trap system punishes all of those variants without constant patch churn.
- The punishment is diegetic. Instead of invisible walls or arbitrary “out of bounds” death zones, players see a physical consequence – flamethrowers mounted in the walls – that fits the game’s fiction of heavily protected vaults.
- It preserves keycard value. With key scarcity restored, high‑value rooms like Dam Battlegrounds’ Control Tower or Spaceport’s Control Tower feel special again. Keys regain their role as tickets to concentrated Epic and Legendary loot.
There is still some light geometry hardening in 1.4.0. Exterior access to at least one locked room in Spaceport’s Control Tower has been explicitly blocked. But the core philosophy is to make illegitimate access self‑correcting through game logic, not just level design.
What this means for keycards and locked rooms now
Going forward, locked rooms function much closer to their launch intent. A simple way to think about them now:
| Location examples | Access requirement | Risk profile after 1.4.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Dam Battlegrounds (Control Tower, Testing Annex) | Specific keycards; rare material for at least one special room | Key holders are safe; exploiters are automatically killed on entry |
| Buried City (Hospital, Town Hall) | Named keycards found in drawers, containers, supply drops | Ambushes still possible, but clipping through the door is suicidal |
| Spaceport, Blue Gate, Stella Montis rooms | Map‑specific keys and occasional quest‑related requirements | Same fire trap behavior if entered via collision exploits |
The friction of finding keys is unchanged. They’re still random, still hidden in mundane containers, and still competing with every other item on the loot table. What’s changed is the incentive structure:
- There’s no longer a viable “free” path to locked rooms.
- Keys not only grant loot but also a shot at scavenging would‑be exploiters’ gear.
- Squads now have a reason to treat keycard carriers as high‑value targets in PvP, since contesting legitimate access is once again the only real option.
Il Toro and the end of the “double pump” shotgun exploit
The fiery trap isn’t the only exploit targeted in 1.4.0. The patch also shuts down a gun‑swapping trick that turned the Il Toro shotgun into a near‑automatic weapon.
Il Toro is designed as a powerful pump‑action shotgun: two to three hits can drop most shields, but you’re supposed to pay for that burst with significant time between shots. Players discovered that by quickly swapping from Il Toro to a Quick Use item and then back again, they could cancel the pump animation and fire far faster than intended.
Practically, that meant:
- Il Toro could delete players and some enemies before they had any chance to respond.
- Squads could stack Il Toro and dominate close‑quarter fights, especially in tight interiors and control points.
Update 1.4.0 removes that interaction. Swapping to items or other weapons no longer bypasses Il Toro’s built‑in cadence. You can still weapon swap to avoid a reload mid‑fight, but you can’t use that swap pattern to multiply the shotgun’s rate of fire.
For anyone leaning on double pumping as a core strategy, this is a genuine nerf. It brings Il Toro back in line with the rest of the weapon sandbox and pushes loadouts toward more conventional combinations rather than shotgun abuse built around an unintended behavior.
Other notable changes bundled into update 1.4.0
Beyond traps and shotguns, the patch also cleans up several smaller issues tied to player movement and presentation:
- Player pushing via piggybacks is gone. Jumping on another player’s back no longer shoves them around. That interaction was part of some door‑clip methods and also created awkward physics in tight spaces.
- Lighting and texture issues have been addressed. Specific lighting glitches and low‑resolution main menu textures are corrected, reducing visual distractions and rough edges.
- Voice issues on restart are fixed. Restarting the game no longer breaks voice playback, which should stabilize audio across long play sessions.
On the content side, the patch also introduces a new Stella Montis modifier: a night raid variant for the map. Stella Montis is already visually dark and tense; the night condition pushes visibility and situational awareness even further, ramping up stress for anyone heading into that region.
The net effect of update 1.4.0 is straightforward: high‑value rooms are dangerous again, but only if you try to break in the wrong way. Keycards matter. Shotgun duels are less about animation bugs and more about actual positioning. And somewhere out there, a raider is learning the hard way that if a door is locked in Arc Raiders, brute‑forcing it now comes with a literal firestorm.
