ARC Raiders Augments: They Decide Your Armour Class

Two axes, one item

Every augment trades capacity against protection. A looting-oriented augment gives you more space and more carry weight but restricts you to light armour. A combat-oriented augment gives you fewer slots but lets you wear medium armour. Neither is better; they are two different answers to “what kills me”. The reason this matters more than it appears: you cannot swap the augment during a raid. You commit at the hideout. A build that turns out to be wrong is wrong for thirty minutes, and the mistake is usually spotted at the moment you find something valuable and have nowhere to put it.

How to choose

Ask which failure is more common in your last ten raids. If you die in fights, take the combat augment and the medium armour it permits. More damage reduction means more time to break contact, and time is the thing you were short of. If you die with an empty bag — leaving loot behind, abandoning a container because there was no space — take the looting augment and accept light armour. You are playing a different game: the goal is to be gone before anyone finds you, not to win an exchange. If you die on the way out, neither of those is the fix. Weight is, and the augment that gives carry weight is the one that lets you actually move at speed while loaded.

The Safekeeper exception

One augment changes the safe pocket rules rather than the armour rules: with Safekeeper equipped, weapons can sit in a safe pocket. That contradicts the common claim that weapons never fit, and it is worth checking which augment is actually equipped before trusting a general rule. The safe pocket page covers the rest of that system.

Tiers and spares

Augments come in tiers, and the higher tier requires a gear bench level, so the augment tree is gated by the same station that makes shields. The economical habit is to build two sets — a looting set and a combat set — and rotate them per loadout rather than re-crafting for every raid. The workshop order explains why the gear bench is the survival bench.

The families, in numbers

Every augment is one of four families — Free, Looting, Tactical, Combat — and the trade this page opened with shows up directly in the stats. Higher tiers need a higher gear bench.

Augment	Backpack	Weight	Shields	Gear bench
Free Loadout	14	35 kg	Light	—
Looting Mk.1	18	50 kg	Light	L1
Tactical Mk.1	15	40 kg	Light / Medium	L1
Combat Mk.1	16	45 kg	Light / Medium	L1
Looting Mk.2	22	60 kg	Light	L2
Combat Mk.2	18	55 kg	Light / Medium / Heavy	L2
Looting Mk.3 Cautious	24	70 kg	Light	L3
Looting Mk.3 Survivor	20	80 kg	Light / Medium	L3
Looting Mk.3 Safekeeper	18	65 kg	Light / Medium / Heavy	L3
Combat Mk.3 Aggressive	18	65 kg	Light / Medium / Heavy	L3

The numbers make the two-axis trade literal: Looting Mk.1 gives 18 backpack slots but only Light shields, while Combat Mk.1 gives 16 slots yet opens Medium. The Mk.3 Looting variants are where capacity peaks — Cautious holds 24 slots, Survivor carries 80 kg — but they stay on Light shields, which is the cost of the space. The Safekeeper row confirms the exception from earlier: it is a Looting augment that still permits Heavy shields, and its safe pocket accepts any item. All figures are from the ARC Raiders wiki, cross-checked against GamesRadar.

The kit as a whole

Augment, shield, and weapons are one decision in three parts. A heavy shield behind a looting augment is impossible; a light shield behind a combat augment wastes the armour class you paid for. Decide what the raid is for first, then let the augment set the ceiling and the shield and skill tree work inside it.