▤ Field manualARC Raiders weak points: where to shoot every machine
The machines that hunt the surface are armored for a reason: dumping rounds into an ARC's chassis is the fastest way to run yourself dry. Almost every ARC has a weak point — an exposed core, a joint, a sensor — that takes far more damage than its plating. Hit it and fights end in seconds; miss it and you're feeding a walking tank.
Read the machine before you shoot
The rule that saves the most ammunition: stop shooting center-mass. ARC armor is built to shrug off body hits. The soft spots are usually the bright, glowing, or moving parts — a reactor's glow, a turret's optic, the gap where a leg meets the hull. Every machine's documented weak points are listed on its dossier; the big ones are worth memorizing.
The bosses
The Queen is a plate-stripping race. Break the armor faceplates to expose the glowing red core, work the yellow leg joints, and — if you've got them — drop mines on its head or the exposed core. It only appears guarding a Harvester, and dropping one is the game's top-tier payout.
The Matriarch and Bastion are the other heavy hitters — armored fortresses on legs where the joints and exposed cores matter far more than the hull. Treat them like the Queen: strip, expose, punish.
The everyday threats
You'll meet the smaller machines constantly. The Wasp, Hornet, and Tick die fast to precise fire, while a Snitch is best killed quietly before it broadcasts your position to everything nearby. Browse the full ARC survey — each machine's dossier maps its documented weak points, health, and salvage.
What we don't fake
Weak-point locations are documented and verified; exact damage multipliers aren't published in any source we trust, so we don't invent them. When a machine's dossier says a multiplier is "unquantified," that means the spot is real but the exact scaling isn't — aim there anyway.