Looting in ARC Raiders means not only what you find, but what you actually keep (if you stay alive). You can spend a complete raid to collect rare crafting items, blueprints, and high-tier mods, only to lose everything in one unlucky encounter with an ARC patrol or a Raider squad. That’s why Embark introduced the Safe Pocket in the game. It’s your personal insurance policy against bad luck and bad decisions, which lets you stash a few valuable items that stay with you even if you die topside. This guide explains how Safe Pockets work in ARC Raiders, how to unlock them, and the ways you can expand their capacity as you progress.
How to Unlock and Use the Safe Pocket in ARC Raiders to Prevent Item Loss
Safe Pocket is a protected inventory slot built into your Raider’s loadout. Anything you place in it will automatically extract to your stash, even if you get killed before making it back to the dropship. It’s the one guarantee you get in an extraction game where death means starting from zero. By default, you start with one Safe Pocket slot, which can hold either a single item or a small stack of similar materials. Safe Pocket is a safe locker for quest items, rare crafting materials, or blue-tier loot you don’t want to lose.
The slot works separately from your backpack and is always visible in your inventory. You can move items in and out of it freely during loot—simply drag them into the slot on PC, or use the “Move to Safe Pocket” prompt on console. Once the raid ends (or you die trying), whatever is in that slot extracts safely back to your base at Speranza.
With the Free Loadout Augment, you can’t access the Safe Pocket, which is the trade-off for using a pre-equipped loadout if you don’t invest resources. To activate the Safe Pocket, equip any Augment except the Free Loadout. Once you slot in a standard or rare Augment, the pocket appears automatically in your inventory during raids. From that point forward, you can store item/s in it to protect your most valuable loot in every run.
How to Get More Safe Pockets in ARC Raiders
One Safe Pocket slot feels limited when you’re hunting down rare items, blueprints, and quest materials. Thankfully, you can expand the Safe Pocket capacity with the Looting MK.2 Augment, which can be found as loot or purchased from Trader Lance at the Clinic in Speranza. This Augment gives an extra Safe Pocket slot, totaling two, and a slight increase to Backpack space.
You’ll need to be Level 7 or higher to buy Looting MK.2 for 6,000 Raider Coins from Lance. His stock rotates over time, so if you don’t find it in stock for now, check back later, maybe after a couple of quests or extractions. There’s also an Looting MK.2’s Epic version that offers one more slot, expanding the pocket slots to three. If you’ve already built the Gear Bench in the Workshop, you can manually craft the Looting MK.2 Augment, which saves you coins and RNG frustration.
Why Safe Pockets are Important
You might first underestimate the Safe Pocket’s importance until your demise has you lose something very valuable, like a rare blueprint, a unique mod, or a crafting materials stack you collected for an upgrade. Given the unpredictability of ARC Raiders’ topside encounters, one ambush can wipe out hours of progress.
Safe Pockets save you from that kind of heartache. You can stash upgrade materials like Rusted Tools, rare Augments, or quest-specific items you can’t easily replace. Once you have extra slots unlocked, you can rotate between priority loot types—one for materials, the other for rare blueprints such as the Anvil blueprint, and a third slot (if unlocked) to save rare trade items.
Because every raid in ARC Raiders is a gamble, always make sure that your Safe Pockets keep the things that you’d be most gutted to lose. Early on items like Rusted Tools, Hornet Drivers, or Arc Motion Cores that you need to upgrade your bench are very important. Then in later raids, you can slot high-level crafting items or random/rare blueprints. If you’re playing solo, Safe Pockets are even more important without teammates to give cover fire or help you recover. Items in Safe Pockets are auto-saved on your death, and everything else in your backpack will be lost.
