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 collecting rare crafting items, blueprints, and high-tier mods, only to lose everything in one bad encounter with ARC machines or opponent Raiders. That’s why Embark introduced the Safe Pocket in the game. It’s your personal insurance policy against bad luck and mistakes, which lets you stash a few valuable items in pocket slots 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 in your loadout. Any quest items, rare crafting materials, or blue-tier loot you place in it will automatically extract to your stash, even if you get killed before making it back to Sprenaza. 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 either stock a single item or a small stack of similar materials.
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 the Safe Pocket will extract safely back to your base.
With the Free Loadout Augment, you can’t access the Safe Pocket, a 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 will appear 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 is not enough when you’re hunting down blueprints, quest materials, and other crucial items. Thankfully, you can expand that capacity with the Looting MK.2 Augment, which you’ll find as loot or buy it right from Trader Lance at the Clinic in Speranza. This specific augment gives you one extra Safe Pocket slot, bringing the count to two, plus a slight increase in locker space.
You do have to be at least Level 7 to buy Looting MK.2 from Lance, and it’ll cost you 6,000 Raider Coins. His stock rotates on a timer, so if he’s sold out when you look, check back later after you’ve run a couple of quests or extractions. There’s an Epic version of the Looting MK.2 as well that unlocks one more slot, taking pocket slots up to three total, or if you’ve already set up the Gear Bench in your Workshop, you can simply craft the Looting MK.2 Augment yourself and save your currency.
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 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, these 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.
