What should I upgrade first in the ARC Raiders workshop?

The cheapest permanent wins first: Scrappy's tier 2 costs a single Dog Collar and improves his passive material generation, and the Stash tier 2 costs 5,000 coins for +24 slots. After those, the Gunsmith unlocks higher-tier weapon crafting and the Medical Lab upgrades your healing items.

How do I find all the materials my workshop upgrades need?

The needed-items haul list on Raiderism aggregates every unbuilt tier's costs (plus open quest hand-ins) into one shopping list, grouped by category, and it updates as you mark tiers built in the workshop planner.

▤ Field manual

ARC Raiders workshop upgrade order: what to build first

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Every workshop station wants a pile of salvage, and hauling the wrong pile first is the most common way to stall your first weeks. The costs and unlocks are all documented, so the order below isn't a vibe — it's arithmetic. Track your own progress in the workshop planner and let the haul list do the shopping math.

The cheap permanent wins come first

Two upgrades cost almost nothing and pay out forever:

Scrappy tier 2 — one Dog Collar. A single Dog Collar raises Scrappy's level and improves his passive material generation. One drawer find, permanent trickle income. Nothing else in the workshop is this cheap.
Stash tier 2 — 5,000 coins for +24 slots (88 total). Storage is the upgrade you feel on every single raid after, because it decides what you're allowed to keep. Coins pile up from vendor sales anyway; spend the first real stack here.

Then buy capability, not comfort

Gunsmith tier 2 — 3× Rusted Tools, 5× Mechanical Components, 8× Wasp Driver. Unlocks crafting of the Arpeggio and opens higher-tier weapon crafting — the doorway to everything in the armory's upper shelves.
Medical Lab tier 2 — 2× Cracked Bioscanner, 5× Durable Cloth, 8× Tick Pod. Upgrades your heals to Sterilized Bandages and the Surge Shield Recharger — survivability compounds.
Refiner tier 2 — 3× Toaster, 5× ARC Motion Core, 8× Fireball Burner. Refining advanced components in-house means fewer vendor round-trips for every later tier.

The Gear Bench, Explosives Station, and Utility Station tier-2s are all worthwhile — heavier shields, mid-tier grenades, the Zipline — but they spend the same Wasp Drivers, Hornet Drivers, and electrical parts you need above. Sequence them behind the Gunsmith unless your playstyle says otherwise.

Let the haul list drive the farming

Mark what you've actually built in the planner, and the needed-items list collapses to exactly what's left — grouped by category, with a chip on every line showing whether the demand comes from the workshop or an open contract. Driver-class ARC parts (Wasp, Hornet, Tick) come from exactly the machines the names suggest; the ARC survey shows which zones they patrol.