Your first few raids in Arc Raiders can feel noisy and messy, and it's tempting to sprint past scrap that looks useless while you chase purple beams and rare drops, but that pile of Rusted Gear you just ignored is doing more for your account than you think, and it ends up sitting right at the core of how you manage your ARC Raiders Items and keep your kits online.
Where Rusted Gear Actually Comes From
Most players start picking it up by accident. You shoot a few basic ARC drones, they fall over, and suddenly you have a couple of pieces of Rusted Gear in your bag. Those low-tier machines are your main farm. They patrol simple loops, they are not that scary, and you can clear them even with a scuffed rifle and budget armour. On top of that, the world is full of old crates, busted consoles and scrap heaps hiding more pieces. Any time you see abandoned gear near roads or in half-collapsed outposts, it is worth a quick check. If you push into industrial zones, that ramps up fast: conveyor belts, broken loaders, dead turrets, all of them can cough up Rusted Gear, although those places also attract other squads looking for the same easy profit.
Why You Should Care Before It Is Too Late
Rusted Gear does not look exciting, but it quietly sits behind a lot of things that keep you playing. Weapon repairs, small attachments, basic gadgets, even some starter armour patches all lean on that one material. When a raid goes wrong and you lose your main loadout, having a pile of Rusted Gear means you can rebuild without staring at an empty stash and logging off. Later on, when you unlock higher-tier blueprints, you still run into it. You might have rare cores and special drops ready to go, and then the recipe also wants a chunk of Rusted Gear that you stopped picking up three hours ago. That is usually the moment people realise they treated the most useful resource in the game like garbage.
Low-Risk Runs And Mental Breathing Room
There is a reason experienced players schedule "scrap runs". They gear up cheap, leave the fancy exotics in the stash and just go bully weak bots, open every crate they can find and bail at the first safe extraction. These sessions are not glamorous, but they refill your core materials without putting your best guns on the line. It changes how the game feels. You are less stressed, you can take fights or skip them, and if you die you shrug and queue again. Over time, this rhythm of high-stakes raids mixed with low-stress Rusted Gear farming keeps your stash stable instead of swinging between rich and completely broke.
Turning Rusted Gear Into Long-Term Stability
If you treat Rusted Gear as a permanent to-do rather than a temporary chore, the whole progression curve gets smoother. You are free to try odd builds, swap weapons just because they look fun and repair gear right away instead of waiting until it is barely usable. Teams that stay stocked on basic scrap also adapt better when a patch hits and balance changes shake up which weapons are strong. While everyone else scrambles to rebuild, you already have the materials to pivot, craft new setups and keep pushing objectives with confidence, and that is how you turn a rusty pile of junk into a quiet advantage that sits behind every raid where you walk out alive with enough loot to justify the run, whether you farm it yourself or decide at some point that it is faster to simply buy ARC Raiders Items in RSVSR.
