Editorial methodology

Where facts come from

Every game claim on Raiderism belongs to one of six tiers, and the lower tiers are always labeled as such:

1. Official — Embark Studios patch notes, the official site, and Embark's own live trackers. Stated as fact and cited.
2. Licensed datasets — structured community data used under its license, cross-referenced before import. Listed on the sources page.
3. Documented community research — named, linkable work by community researchers, attributed inline.
4. Author testing — first-hand observations, published only with the author, the patch tested, and the conditions. Raiderism never invents test results.
5. Community reports — unverified player reports, always marked as unverified.
6. Inference — arithmetic on documented numbers (for example, coin per kilo from documented sell prices and weights). The working is shown.

A claim never moves up this ladder silently. A community report repeated a hundred times is still a community report.

How data is validated

The dataset behind the database pages is compiled from the sources above and run through an automated validation pipeline before anything ships: every record is checked against a strict schema, and every cross-reference — each recipe input, quest reward, trader listing, ARC loot entry, and map pin — must resolve to a real entity or the build fails. Relationships you see on entity pages ("used in", "sold by", "salvaged from") are derived from that validated data, not written by hand.

Editorial standard

• Every recommendation states its scenario — what it is best for, against what, and as of which patch.
• First-hand testing is published only with the author, the patch tested, and the conditions named.
• A page's updated date changes only when its content substantively changes.

Versioning

Data is versioned against the game build it was compiled from — currently 1.36.1 (game 1.38.0, 2026-07-21). Guides carry the game version they were written or last reviewed against, plus a revision history when they change substantively.

Corrections

When something is wrong, we fix the data or the prose, note the change, and re-validate. The corrections page explains how to report an error and what happens next.