There's a sneaky way to cheat Arc Raiders' tutorial to keep your starting pistol and all the loot you find

Arc Raiders helmet
(Image credit: Embark Studios)

The tutorial for new extraction shooter Arc Raiders is short and to the point. In just a few minutes it teaches you the basics of moving and shooting, looting, and learning the hard way what happens when you make too much noise in a PvPvE game: either a robot or another player is going to hear you and come out guns blazing.

When you try to pry open a door in the tutorial, a pair of NPCs will suddenly appear to gun you down, then loot your body while you're incapacitated. But savvy players have figured out that if you drop all your items before that cutscene plays, you can pick them back up off the ground once your character awakens and then finish the rest of the tutorial with your pockets stuffed with goodies.

None of the salvage you'll find in the tutorial is particularly important or mega valuable—you'll find much more and better stuff once you start playing the game proper—but why not take the leg up? It takes only a few seconds to pull up your inventory and empty your pockets.

Note that in the video above I didn't drop my pistol, and when I woke up after the cutscene: gonezo.

When you complete the tutorial Arc Raiders will give you some fresh weapons, but the starting Burletta is actually better than the pistol you'll find in your inventory a few minutes later. It's definitely worth holding on to.

If you find all the loot spots in the tutorial there will actually be more than you can carry, so you'll need to break a few salvage items down into scrap that can be combined into the same stacks. Make sure you hold onto the rubber duck, which you can find inside the pizza restaurant. It's a useful noisemaker or can be sold for 1,000 arc bucks (aka Raider Coins)—and since the game only starts you with 5,000, that's a nice little bonus.

Arc Raiders Field DepotsArc Raiders Field CratesArc Raiders dog collarArc Raiders best skillsArc Raiders Expeditions

Arc Raiders Field Depots: Where to find 'em
Arc Raiders Field Crates: How to use 'em
Arc Raiders dog collar: Train Scrappy
Arc Raiders best skills: Survive the surface
Arc Raiders Expeditions: Retire your Raider

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

You must confirm your public display name before commenting

Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.