ARC Raiders Stella Montis: Two Levels, One Funnel

The level problem

The upper and lower floors connect through a small number of transitions. That is the entire tactical situation. Anyone moving between levels — you, a squad hunting you, a player running from ARC — passes through the same handful of doorways, stairwells, and lifts. The consequence is a decision you should make before you loot anything: pick a level and commit to it. Bouncing between floors doubles the number of transitions you expose yourself in, and it does so while carrying the loot that makes you worth killing. Players who die on Stella Montis usually die in a transition, not in a room. Treat a transition the way you treat an extraction: clear it, listen, then move. Breaching alone has a default noise radius around a hundred metres, which is wide enough to reach players on the other level. A quiet entrance is not the same as a silent one.

Route by room name

The facility is legible once you learn the labels, because the signposted rooms are the anchors you navigate by rather than corridors: Assembly Workshops, Cargo Dock A and B, Medical Research, Cultural Archives, the Atrium, and the Lobby. Plan a chain — for example workshops to cargo dock to a transition — and know which one you abandon first when the raid goes wrong. Loot tiers per room are not published anywhere reliable, only loot categories. Anyone quoting a precise value for the Cultural Archives is guessing. What you can rely on is the category bias: technical and research loot indoors, industrial material around the docks.

Extraction

Stella Montis uses three exit types: airshafts, the Metro Station, and Raider Hatches. Airshafts are the fast, quiet option and the one worth knowing first; the metro is the loud, obvious one; hatches are the conditional option that disappears under hostile conditions. Its alternate condition is Night Raid, which kills the hatch option outright — see what Night Raid changes.

Bastions and open floor

Bastions spawn on every map in wide open areas, and this map still has them. Any open stretch is an ARC problem before it is a player problem, so crossing one is a decision about noise and time, not about cover. The enemy threat ladder covers what each machine asks of you.

Is it worth the unlock

At difficulty four with a 24-round gate, Stella Montis is not the hardest map in the game — Riven Tides is. It is, however, the map where a bad kit hurts most, because there is no open ground to disengage across. Bring a coherent loadout, name your exit, and leave as soon as you have the item that justified the risk. The map ladder shows what else sits at that tier.