If you have been grinding ARC Raiders since launch, you already know how tense an extraction run can get, and how much a single bad pull can hurt your stash and your plans for the next night of gaming with your friends, especially once you start caring about every ARC Raiders BluePrint you drag out of the zone. Embark is leaning into that feeling with Expedition Project, the first big seasonal style reset for the game, but it is doing it in a way that does not just nuke everyone’s progress on a fixed date and call it a day.

What This “Voluntary Wipe” Actually Does

Most extraction games just hit a big reset button for the whole player base, whether you are ready or not. Here it is different. Once you hit Level 20, you can opt into an Expedition. If you say yes, your level, skill tree, stash and blueprints get wiped. Sounds harsh at first. The twist is that you skip the early game slog in Speranza. All maps are open, your workshop is already upgraded, and you can jump straight back into proper raids instead of crawling through basic starter runs.

Why Players Are Thinking About Min-Maxing

This is where it starts to feel like a proper prestige system. When you sign up, the game checks how much your stash is worth and how many Coins you are sitting on. For every one million Coins’ worth of value, your next Raider spawns with one extra skill point, up to a max of five. So people are already talking about hoarding loot, selling clever, and pushing their stash to five million before they click that button. It is the kind of thing where one friend resets early just to try it, and the rest of the group goes, “Hang on, how many bonus points did you get?” and suddenly everyone is theorycrafting their last few runs before the wipe.

Perks That Stick And Buffs That Come And Go

The Expedition is not only about stats on a fresh character. Some upgrades follow your account forever. You get the Patchwork Raider outfit and the Scrappy Janitor Cap, plus an extra 12 slots of stash space that never go away, which is huge in an extraction game where you are always juggling “Do I sell this now, or save it for later?”. On top of that you get temporary buffs: faster repairs by 10%, a small 5% XP boost, and roughly 6% more materials from Scrappy. These bonuses only stay active if you join the next Expedition when it rolls around, but if you keep opting in, they stack up over your first three runs, so the people who commit to the loop end up feeling noticeably stronger.

A Short Window And A Big Decision

The catch is timing. The sign-up window is pretty tight, running from December 17th to December 22nd, and everyone who joins launches together on the 22nd. That means you have a few days to squeeze every last bit of value out of your stash, decide if you can stomach losing your current build, and maybe argue with your squad about whether to go in as a group or wait for the next round. It is a tense call: you are giving up comfort, but you are getting better long-term stats, more storage, and a cleaner start that feels a lot like hitting prestige in other shooters, especially if you are the kind of player who is already planning what to buy ARC Raiders BluePrint for your next min-max run.