Free loadouts are one of Arc Raiders' best features for players at any skill level. You get randomized equipment at no cost, letting you jump into raids without risking your hard-earned resources or crafted gear. Unlike most extraction shooters where early progression can be brutal, Arc Raiders solves this problem by giving you truly unlimited free equipment runs.
There's no catch. No cooldowns between uses, no limited quantities, and no hidden costs. You can use free loadouts as often as you want, making them perfect for learning the game, completing low-risk missions, recovering from losses, or just playing without stress.
What Are Free Loadouts
Free loadouts provide a randomized set of basic equipment that you can use instead of your personal gear. When you die, you lose nothing from your stash. When you extract successfully, you keep everything you found plus the free equipment you spawned with. This system removes the traditional gear wall that locks players out after bad runs.
The equipment quality is lower than custom loadouts, but the unlimited availability means you always have a way to play and potentially rebuild your inventory. Every successful extraction adds items permanently to your stash, allowing you to recover from setbacks without spending resources.
How to Access Free Loadouts
Getting a free loadout takes a few clicks in the pre-raid preparation screen. Here's the process:
Hit Play and select your map to start preparing for a raid. This brings up the loadout screen where you configure your equipment before deploying.
Look at the top of the screen for a tab labeled "Free loadout". The interface won't show what items you'll receive yet, which confuses a lot of new players. Click this Free loadout tab to switch from your custom loadouts.
Once you've selected the Free loadout tab, click Ready Up to confirm and enter the raid.
Your randomized items won't appear during preparation. The equipment only shows up once you're actually in the raid and deployed. This is why the loadout screen looks empty when you pick the free option.
Free Loadout Equipment Breakdown
Knowing what you'll get helps you plan each raid. Free loadouts give you a consistent baseline with some randomized elements.
Weapons and Ammunition
You'll get one of three rank 1 weapons: the Kettler I, Rattler I, or Stitcher I. Which one is random each time. You'll also receive exactly one stack of ammo, so you need to make your shots count and avoid long firefights.
All three weapons are gray rarity with no upgrades or modifications. This puts you at a real disadvantage against players running customized loadouts with higher-tier weapons and attachments.
Defensive Equipment
Every free loadout includes a Light Shield Augment. It's basic protection, less effective than higher-tier shields. The augment itself is gray rarity, which matters for your inventory capacity.
You also get a shield recharger to restore your shield energy during raids. This is especially valuable given your limited healing supplies.
Medical Supplies
You'll receive a few bandages for healing health damage. The quantity is small, so you've got basic sustainability but can't afford to take repeated hits. Combined with your shield recharger, you can handle some damage but not much.
Additional Equipment
You might get extra gadgets like grenades with your free loadout. Sometimes you'll get a small collection of meds and grenades, but it's not guaranteed every run. This randomization means some free loadout runs give you more tactical options than others.
Augment Limitations and Inventory Management
The gray rarity augment creates specific problems you need to understand before deploying.
Your augment only holds a few items before it's full. This severely limits how much loot you can extract compared to higher-tier augments with way more inventory space. You'll constantly make tough calls about what to pick up and what to leave behind.
However, you can't swap your augment during a raid. Even if you kill other players and loot their superior augments, you're stuck with what you brought. So if you manage to take down better-equipped opponents, you still face hard choices about which of their items you can actually carry with your limited space.
The small backpack reinforces the need for selective looting. You can't just collect everything you see. Prioritization is mandatory.
The Safe Pocket Disadvantage
Free loadouts lack one of Arc Raiders' most important features: the Safe Pocket. This is the main downside of using free equipment.
A Safe Pocket guarantees you'll extract with at least one piece of loot even if you die before reaching an extraction point. Without it, you must survive the entire raid and successfully extract to keep anything you collected.
This makes things way more intense when you find rare or valuable items. If you discover something you desperately want to keep, there's no safety net. You can't die, and you must reach extraction. The pressure spikes significantly when you're carrying valuable loot without Safe Pocket protection.
For players who aren't focused on looting, this matters less. But if you're trying to build your resources through item collection, the lack of a Safe Pocket creates serious risk.
Trading Free Loadout Augments with Lance
Surviving a raid with your free loadout gives you value beyond the loot you collected. You can convert the free loadout augment itself into better equipment through Lance at the Clinic.
After extracting successfully, talk to Lance at the Clinic. He'll trade your free loadout augment for one of three green-rarity augments. Green rarity isn't top-tier, but it's a meaningful upgrade from the gray rarity augment you get with free loadouts.
You can do this exchange every time you extract with a free loadout augment. This lets you accumulate multiple green augments: keep spares in your stash and exchange them for new green augments whenever you want.
This trade has value beyond the immediate upgrade. By getting green augments through free runs, you save crafting resources or Coin you'd otherwise spend buying or making these augments. This helps you prepare for fully equipped raids more cheaply. You go from a completely free run to a cheap one where you've got better equipment but still kept your upfront investment low.
Alternatively, you can dismantle everything you extracted with, including the augment, to get materials. These materials reduce the cost of putting together a heavily equipped loadout for future raids.
Strategic Approaches to Free Loadout Raids
Two main strategies dominate free loadout gameplay, each with different goals and risk levels.
The Loot Goblin Approach
This conservative strategy accepts your gear disadvantage and focuses on collecting resources while avoiding fights.
The loot goblin playstyle is slower and more methodical. Your goal is to grab as much loot as possible while minimizing combat. This means carefully watching your surroundings, listening for PvP fights happening elsewhere, and deliberately avoiding those areas.
You also need to be careful around the ARC robots patrolling the map. These robots cause two problems for loot-focused players: they reveal your position to other players, and they drain your already limited healing supplies.
The loot goblin approach treats raids as resource-gathering exercises rather than competitive fights. You accept your limitations, work within them, and extract with whatever valuables you can safely collect. This minimizes risk but also limits your potential rewards to uncontested loot.
The PvP Chaser Approach
This aggressive strategy tries to overcome your gear disadvantage through positioning and surprise attacks.
The PvP chasing playstyle means actively hunting better-equipped players, ambushing them, eliminating them, and taking their superior equipment. The idea is that by catching an opponent off guard, you can offset your gear disadvantage and secure a complete loadout of higher-quality items.
Once you've killed a player and grabbed their kit, you face another decision: keep hunting other players now that you've got better equipment, or play it safe to ensure you extract with your newly acquired gear.
This approach is more exciting but carries way more risk given your initial equipment disadvantage. You're almost always at a disadvantage with free loadout gear, so PvP encounters require surprise and better positioning to succeed.
Recommended Hybrid Approach
Some players prefer combining both strategies based on circumstances: start as a loot goblin when undergeared, then use the resources you got for free to fund a complete loadout for your next raid. This manages risk while still allowing progression.
When to Use Free Loadouts
Free loadouts serve specific purposes in your overall Arc Raiders strategy.
Early Game Progression
When you're first learning Arc Raiders and completing early missions, free loadouts are your best bet. Since you won't risk losing anything valuable, you can focus on understanding game mechanics, map layouts, enemy behaviors, and extraction points without the pressure of potential losses.
Resource Conservation
Whenever you're low on Coin or crafting materials, free loadouts let you keep playing and potentially improve your situation without burning through your existing resources.
Low-Pressure Gaming
If you want a more relaxed experience where losses don't matter, free loadouts deliver exactly that. You can hop in, mess around, and maybe complete some missions without worrying about setbacks.
Task Completion
Free loadouts work great for throwaway runs where you're just completing tasks. If you've got specific objectives that don't need optimal gear, using free equipment lets you accomplish these goals while saving your crafted loadouts for harder content.
Recovery from Losses
After losing valuable equipment in previous raids, free loadouts let you keep playing immediately without needing to rebuild your resources first. This prevents loss spirals where players can't afford to continue playing effectively.
The True Costs of Free Loadouts
Free loadouts don't require Coin or materials, but they carry hidden costs that affect your effectiveness.
Time investment is one cost. Runs with free loadouts may take longer or be less efficient than fully equipped raids, meaning you generate resources more slowly than you would with optimal gear.
Your reduced firepower and survivability compared to custom loadouts is another cost. You'll lose fights you might have won with better equipment, and you'll die to threats that properly geared players could survive.
The limited ammunition means you can't engage in extended fights. The few healing items restrict how much damage you can take. The small augment capacity limits your loot potential. These limitations combine to reduce your overall effectiveness compared to prepared loadouts.
Understanding these costs helps you set realistic expectations and choose when free loadouts best serve your goals versus when investing in proper equipment would be more effective.
Conclusion
Free loadouts in Arc Raiders give you an unlimited safety net at any progression level. By understanding how to access them, what equipment they provide, and how to approach raids strategically given their limitations, you can use free loadouts as an effective tool for learning, recovering from losses, completing low-risk objectives, or just enjoying the game without pressure.
The ability to exchange free loadout augments with Lance adds another layer of value, letting successful free runs contribute toward building better-equipped loadouts for future raids. Whether you prefer the cautious loot goblin approach or the aggressive PvP chaser strategy, free loadouts enable consistent gameplay regardless of your current resource situation.