ARC Raiders Workshop: Which Bench to Upgrade First

The stations that do upgrade

• Weapon bench (gunsmith) — weapon crafting, mod slots, and higher tiers. This is where a second real primary comes from.
• Gear bench (equipment) — shields and augments. Level 1 opens light and medium shields; the next level opens the heavy shield and better augment variants.
• Medical lab — healing items and shield rechargers, including the faster ones that skip a slow heal timer.
• Explosives station — grenades and mines, which is what crowd control actually means against ARC.
• Utility station — mobility and stealth tools, from hooks to concealment.
• Refiner — converts junk material into rarer components, which is how a stockpile of low-tier junk becomes a crafting budget.

The only order question that matters

Arguments about upgrade order usually compare five stations at once. In practice it is a two-way decision: weapon bench or gear bench first, and everything else follows. Pick the gear bench if your raids end in a fight. A heavy shield plus a better augment raises how much punishment you can absorb before an engagement goes bad, and that single change does more for your survival than a marginal weapon upgrade — because a weapon upgrade only helps when you were already going to win the trade. Pick the weapon bench if your raids end because you cannot kill things fast enough: ARC taking too long to break, a player out-shooting you at the range you chose. Better weapons and mods shorten fights, and short fights are the cheapest defence there is. A widely copied community order is weapons, then Scrappy, then gear bench. It is a reasonable default and nothing in the game enforces it. Your death cause should outrank any list, including this one.

Scrappy is part of the upgrade tree

Scrappy, the mechanical bird in the workshop, passively collects basic material after every raid win or lose, and its level sets how much it brings back. Upgrading it is not glamorous and it is the only source of income that does not cost you a raid. Claim the haul before you spend anything, and level it early so every subsequent raid pays slightly better.

Use Track, not memory

Every material listed on a bench upgrade has a Track option. Tracking marks the item with a marker that glows during raids and in your inventory, so you find it by looking instead of by alt-tabbing to a materials list mid-raid. On a thirty-minute clock that difference is worth more than the material itself.

After the walls are built

Once the benches are up, the workshop shifts from upgrades to throughput: crafting duplicates while a bench is idle so a lost kit does not hurt. That rhythm — one kit in use, one kit in reserve — is the real end state of the workshop. The death penalty page explains why the reserve matters, and blueprints explains what the benches can actually build.