Rusted Gears in ARC Raiders: Uses and How to Get Them

Rusted gears in ARC Raiders: what they actually are

Salvage runs in ARC Raiders are built around a small set of crafting materials, and rusted gears sit near the top of that hierarchy. They are a tier-two mechanical component used to repair, modify, and craft specific weapons, gadgets, and field equipment tied to the machines that roam the surface. The “rusted” prefix is not cosmetic: it describes the in-fiction state of recovered parts, and it is also the gameplay signal that the item belongs to the mid-tier recycling economy rather than the basic scrap tier a new player picks up in the first hour.

Players who treat rusted gears as just another generic material usually end up either over-spending them on a low-value recipe or hoarding them out of fear of wasting a rare drop. Neither approach is necessary. Gears have a defined role in the current crafting trees, a clear set of source locations, and a small number of high-value recipes. Once those three points are understood, the material stops feeling scarce and starts feeling like a planning tool for a run.

What follows covers what rusted gears do inside the crafting system, where they actually drop in the current technical test build, which weapons and equipment consume them, how the extraction loop interacts with them on a per-run basis, and how to make a defensible decision about spending them before the next patch shifts the economy. The mechanics described here reflect publicly observable behavior in the live test and the most recent reporting on the project, including the ARC Raiders impressions published by Game Informer, and the broader description of the title on its Wikipedia entry.

How rusted gears fit into the salvage economy

ARC Raiders splits recovered loot into a few rough tiers. Tier-one materials such as basic metal parts, wires, and chemical agents come from common containers and machine scrap. Tier-two materials such as rusted gears, heavy springs, and power coils come from rarer containers, machine cores, and more demanding encounters. Tier-three materials sit at the top and are tied to endgame events or named zones with specific conditions.

Within that structure, rusted gears are the mechanical equivalent of a craft currency. They are not consumed in massive stacks the way basic metal is, and they are not as rare as the named materials used for the highest-tier weapons. The result is a mid-range material that defines progression between a fresh kit and a fully built loadout. Most players will accumulate more of them than they expect and spend fewer than they plan to, because the recipes that use them are concentrated in a small number of workbench nodes rather than spread across the entire tree.

Three rules make the rest of the economy easier to read. First, rusted gears are bound to your account within a season, not to a single weapon, so destroying a gun never returns the gears that built it. Second, they do not stack into the highest-density container, which means storage pressure shows up faster than with basic materials. Third, the current technical test has limited safe-extraction windows, so hoarding them in a full stash is a real risk if you fail to extract on a contested run.

There is also a quiet but important detail about how the material is described in the inventory. Rusted gears are not labeled as “scrap” or “salvage,” the way tier-one materials are. They sit in their own mechanical group, alongside power coils and refined alloys, and that grouping affects which workshop branches accept them. A recipe that requires a mechanical input will not accept a chemical or an alloy substitute, even when the stack count looks similar.

Where rusted gears come from

Rusted gears are not a random drop from any container. They appear in a predictable set of activities, and learning the order of those activities is the fastest way to stop feeling bottlenecked by the material.

Salvaging ARC machines and their cores

The most reliable source of rusted gears is the salvage loop on defeated or disabled ARC units. Field-salvaging a smaller ARC with a torch usually yields a few basic parts and occasionally one gear. Larger machines, and especially their internal cores once opened, give a higher chance of a gear drop. Because the drop is tied to the inner component, players who skip the core and only strip the chassis will see far fewer gears than players who finish the dismantle with a proper tool.

Core extraction takes longer than a quick chassis strip, and the time spent on it is one of the reasons players leave cores behind on a tight run. In practice, the gear economy is partly a time economy: spending an extra thirty seconds at a core during a quiet window is worth it, while spending that same half minute while a hostile squad is closing in is a poor trade. The source itself is stable; the value of the source depends on the run you are currently in.

Looting high-tier containers in named zones

Rusted gears appear in mechanical crates and toolboxes found in the named surface locations, particularly in industrial and research sites. The drop rate is not published, and Embark Studios has not given a numeric value, but community observation suggests a low-percentage roll per container. Running a long route through two or three named zones per excursion is the most efficient way to bank them without depending on a machine encounter, and it also spreads the risk of a single contested zone across several possible drops.

There is a real distinction between mechanical crates and the more common general-purpose containers. A metal toolbox with a visible gear icon on its model is a much better candidate than a generic supply crate, even when both sit in the same building. Learning to read the container type before opening it saves time and keeps the route focused on the materials that actually matter for a mid-tier build.

Field crates, raider stashes, and event rewards

Smaller mid-tier caches, including the stash nodes left by other raiders and timed event rewards, can drop rusted gears as part of their fixed reward pool. These are not repeatable farms, but they are worth prioritizing during a call-to-arms event because they compress several materials into a single objective. A run that hits two of these caches in one route can move a player’s gear count forward as much as a long machine-hunting loop, without the same level of exposure to ARC patrols.

The trade-off is opportunity cost. The same caches also drop alloys, coils, and rare consumables, and the time spent on them is time not spent on a machine core. For players who are short on gears but rich on everything else, the caches are usually worth a detour. For players who are short on several materials at once, the caches compete with other objectives and have to be weighed in context.

What rusted gears are used for

Rusted gears are an input, not a finished product. Their value is defined by the recipes that consume them. In the current build, those recipes cluster in three areas: weapon crafting and modification, deployable equipment, and field utility items.

Weapon and attachment crafting

Several mid- and upper-tier weapons, as well as a small set of attachments, require rusted gears as part of their crafting cost. These are typically the weapons that sit just above the starter kit and form the practical mid-game loadout. The exact list changes with patches, so the safe habit is to read the recipe in the workbench rather than memorizing a specific weapon name. A recipe that was efficient last season may be a poor use of materials this season, even when the weapon itself is still in the game.

Attachments are a separate problem. Some attachment slots accept gears as a partial cost, especially the mechanical attachments that change a weapon’s handling rather than its damage profile. Players who only look at the damage stat on a weapon often overlook how much of the recipe cost is concentrated in the attachment tree, and that is where a small reserve of gears can disappear quickly if every modification is bought in a single session.

Deployable equipment and field tools

Field equipment such as repair tools, shield modules, and certain grenades accept rusted gears as one of the mechanical inputs. These recipes tend to have lower gear costs than weapon recipes but require supporting materials that are themselves mid-tier, which is why gears are usually the binding constraint. A repair tool that needs three gears and four power coils is, in practice, gated by whichever material is shortest, and the gear often turns out to be the limiting input because it is harder to farm in volume.

Deployable shields are a special case. They are consumed on use, which means each deployment is a fresh craft in the inventory sense, even when the recipe is unlocked. Players who treat a shield as a one-time purchase and then spend it freely are usually the same players who run out of gears a few sessions later. A shield should be spent with the same caution as a mid-tier weapon, because the cost is paid every time the item is rebuilt.

Workshop upgrades and station unlocks

Some workshop nodes that unlock new crafting branches cost rusted gears in addition to other materials. These unlocks are permanent for the season, which makes them the highest-value early spend for players who plan to push into harder content. An unlock is not a consumable: it cannot be lost on a failed run, and it does not need to be replaced when the recipe list shifts. That permanence is the reason most experienced players prioritize unlocks over individual weapon crafts during the first weeks of a season.

The flip side is that an unlock can also lock a player into a branch that the next patch decides to nerf. Choosing which branch to unlock first is itself a planning decision, and the right answer depends on the player’s intended role. A support player and a frontline player will not pick the same first unlock, and that difference is part of why the economy feels personal rather than uniform.

Deciding when to spend rusted gears

The single most common mistake with rusted gears is spending them on a recipe that is about to be replaced by the next patch. The extraction-shooter genre has historically shifted crafting trees between seasons, and a recipe that looks efficient in one patch can lose its role in the next. A simple decision framework reduces the risk of waste without demanding a perfect read of the meta.

Spend on permanent workshop unlocks before you spend on consumable gear, because unlocks survive a rebalance and consumables do not.
Spend on one fully built mid-tier weapon rather than partially building two, because incomplete recipes return nothing when the recipe changes.
Hold a small reserve in your stash before a major patch window, because patch-day downtime is when material prices spike in the player economy.
Avoid spending on attachment variants that duplicate a stat you already have on a working weapon, because the marginal gain rarely justifies the material.

That list is a starting point, not a rulebook. The exact threshold for “small reserve” depends on how often the player runs, how aggressively they push into harder zones, and how comfortable they are with a few sessions of low crafting output after a rebalance. Players who run daily can hold a thinner reserve than players who log in once a week, and the framework has to bend around that difference.

How rusted gears interact with the extraction loop

ARC Raiders is built around a load in, loot, extract loop. That loop has a direct effect on how rusted gears behave in practice. Because they are mid-tier, the difference between banking them and losing them is the difference between a successful run and a wasted one. The mechanical loop rewards planning, and gears sit at the center of that planning because they unlock the equipment that makes later runs safer.

Safe extraction and stash pressure

Stash space is finite, and rusted gears occupy a slot. Players who pick up every gear they find can fill their inventory before they reach a safe extraction point, which forces a decision between bringing the gear out and picking up a higher-value target. The recommended habit is to set a personal cap per run, such as keeping your inventory half-empty by the midpoint of the route, so that a late-route encounter does not force a discard. A discard is not just a lost material: it is a lost opportunity to learn the route well enough to make the cap feel comfortable rather than restrictive.

Stash pressure also affects the post-extraction phase. A stash that is already close to full when a run ends is a stash that is one bad drop away from forcing a sell decision at the workbench, and selling gears at a discount is a quiet but steady drain on the player’s long-term reserves. The right time to manage stash space is during the run, not after it.

Risk and reward during a contested call-to-arms

During a call-to-arms event, more players are in the same zone, which raises both the chance of a PvP engagement and the chance of a high-tier reward. Gears found in those encounters are valuable precisely because the event conditions limit how often they appear. Carrying them out usually means accepting a slower, more cautious extraction path, and that trade is part of the design. A player who tries to extract a contested gear cache through the fastest route is gambling the material against a route they would not normally pick.

The honest answer is that some players will lose gears during call-to-arms events, and that loss is part of the economy’s rhythm. The right response is to treat each call-to-arms as a planned risk: decide in advance how many gears are worth the contested extraction, and stop chasing the rest. The plan is more important than the result of any single event.

Comparison: rusted gears versus other tier-two materials

It helps to see rusted gears next to the materials that share their tier, because each one has a different role in a build.

Material	Primary use	Drop source	Stack pressure	Patch sensitivity
Rusted gears	Mechanical recipes, workshop unlocks, mid-tier weapons	ARC cores, industrial containers, mid-tier caches	Moderate	Medium, recipes change but core unlocks persist
Heavy springs	Shock-damage weapons, shield modules	Salvage piles, vehicle bays	Low	Medium, tied to specific weapon families
Power coils	Energy weapons, deployable shields	Power substations, research zones	Moderate	High, energy balance shifts frequently
Refined alloys	Armor plating, defensive modules	Foundries, heavy ARC cores	High	Low, defensive recipes tend to be stable
Chemical agents	Grenades, medical recipes, fuel cells	Lab zones, medical crates	Low	Medium, varies with consumable balance

The pattern is clear. Rusted gears are the most general-purpose mid-tier mechanical input, which is why they feel scarce even when the drop rate is not the lowest in the tier. The materials that compete with them tend to be specialists. That generalist role is also why the material ends up in so many recipes: it is the path of least resistance for a designer who needs a mechanical input that fits both a weapon branch and a deployable branch, and that convenience at the design level translates into demand at the player level.

A practical farming route for rusted gears

There is no single best route, because the map rotates and player traffic shifts the value of any fixed plan. A route is a structure, not a list of waypoints. The structure below works across most current maps and prioritizes safety over raw speed, which is the correct trade for a tier-two material.

Start at a low-traffic spawn, drop into a route that reaches a named industrial or research site within the first two minutes.
Clear mechanical containers first, then any ARC encounters in the same compound, because the same zone usually contains both.
Move to a second named site along a path that has at least one safe extraction point within a one-minute sprint.
Stop early if your inventory is more than two-thirds full, because the next encounter is when you are most likely to lose the run.
Extract at the closest safe point, even if it means leaving behind a contested high-tier cache, because a banked gear is worth more than a lost one.

This structure is deliberately boring. The point of a tier-two material run is consistency, not hero plays. Routes that chase every sound on the map turn a material farm into a PvP gamble, and the gear is rarely worth the risk when an extraction is uncertain. The boredom is the feature: it is the same loop, run after run, with small variations, and that repetition is what builds a stable reserve over a week of play rather than a single lucky session.

One practical adjustment is to vary the second site based on which one has been looted recently in the player’s squad. A site that has been cleared in the last few minutes is a worse target than a site that has been quiet for an hour, even when both are mechanically similar. The For additional context, extraction shooter rewards local knowledge, and route variety is a way to convert that knowledge into materials.

Common mistakes when handling rusted gears

Even experienced extraction players repeat a small set of mistakes with rusted gears. Most of them come from a misunderstanding of the material’s role, not from a lack of skill.

Treating rusted gears as a long-term currency and refusing to spend them, which leaves the stash full and the build unfinished.
Spending them on a low-value attachment before unlocking the workshop branch that uses them, which wastes a permanent cost on a temporary item.
Crafting two half-finished weapons instead of one complete weapon, because a half-built recipe is not saved by a future patch.
Ignoring stash space, which leads to a forced drop during a run and breaks the planning that makes the rest of the loop work.
Assuming the drop rate is fixed across containers, when the real pattern is that named zones and ARC cores are the most reliable sources.

Each of these mistakes has a specific fix, but the underlying cause is the same. Players treat rusted gears as if they were a generic resource, and the material stops making sense at that level. Once the material is treated as a mechanical tier-two input with its own recipe list and its own drop sources, the mistakes become easier to see and easier to avoid.

How rusted gears fit into a broader build plan

Rusted gears are most useful when they support a build plan, not when they sit at the center of one. A player who decides on a role for a season, such as a frontline fighter, a support player, or a stealth extractor, will spend gears more efficiently than a player who crafts whatever the workbench lists first. The materials are a means of expressing a build, and a build is a means of playing the game in a style that matches the map and the team.

A frontline player will lean into weapon recipes that use gears and a heavy armor set that uses refined alloys. A support player will spend gears on deployable equipment and hold the rest for a future unlock. A stealth player will spend fewer gears on weapons and more on field tools that shorten engagements. None of these plans is the objectively correct one. They are examples of how the same material can express different intentions, and the right plan for a given player is the one that matches the way that player actually moves through a map.

The plan also has to survive a few sessions. A build that demands ten gears in the first hour of a season is a build that fails for most players, because the supply simply is not there yet. Spreading the spend across the first week, with a clear priority order, tends to produce a more usable kit than trying to complete the build in a single marathon session.

Patch sensitivity and the long-term value of rusted gears

ARC Raiders is in a technical test phase, and Embark Studios has signaled that crafting balance will change between updates. The implication for rusted gears is that their recipe tree will move, but their identity as a mechanical tier-two material is unlikely to disappear. The recipes that consume them may shift, the specific weapons may change, and the drop sources may be adjusted, but a mid-tier material that supports a workshop unlock and a small set of weapons is a stable role in an extraction shooter.

The practical response is to treat the material as a planning input rather than a long-term investment. Spend it on permanent unlocks first, hold a small reserve for patch-day flexibility, and re-read the recipe list at the workbench after every update. That habit is more valuable than any specific recipe knowledge, because it survives a rebalance. A player who has internalized the habit will adapt to a new patch in one session; a player who has memorized a specific recipe list will need to relearn the economy from scratch.

There is also a question of how much of the player’s stash should be in gears versus other materials during a patch window. The honest answer is that it depends on what the patch notes say. A patch that explicitly reworks mechanical recipes is a reason to hold thinner; a patch that only touches weapons or armor is a reason to keep the usual reserve. Reading the notes carefully is itself a skill, and it is one that compounds over multiple seasons.

How rusted gears compare across similar extraction shooters

The extraction-shooter genre has converged on a small number of design patterns, and the role of a tier-two mechanical material is one of them. A short comparison is useful because it clarifies what the gears do and do not control.

Game	Equivalent material	Role	Main difference from ARC Raiders
ARC Raiders	Rusted gears	Mechanical recipes, workshop unlocks	Tied to ARC machine salvage and industrial sites
Hunt: Showdown	Toolbox parts	Consumable utility crafting	No persistent workshop, lighter crafting loop
Escape from Tarkov	Mechanical parts and screws	Weapon modification, hideout upgrades	Larger stash and longer session length
Cycle: Frontier	Recycled parts	Weapon and gear crafting	Smaller map, faster rotation, different drop pacing

Each game uses a similar material to mark the boundary between a starter kit and a mid-game build. The boundary is useful because it gives a player a sense of progress without requiring a full endgame grind. ARC Raiders places that boundary a little lower than some of its peers, which is one reason rusted gears feel central even when they are not the rarest material on the list. A player who has played several of these games will recognize the role immediately, even if the specific recipes feel new.

The difference between ARC Raiders and its peers is partly about pacing. A shorter session length and a tighter extraction window put more pressure on each individual material decision, and that pressure is what makes the gear economy feel personal. A longer-session game can absorb a bad spend; ARC Raiders punishes one more quickly, and the gear is often at the center of the punishment.

Signals that you are handling rusted gears well

Progress in an extraction shooter is hard to read because every run feels different. A small set of signals makes it easier to tell whether the material is being managed well.

Your stash has a steady, small reserve of rusted gears rather than a large pile or an empty slot.
You complete at least one workshop unlock per session that uses gears as part of its cost.
You extract a usable weapon or tool from the workbench at least once every two sessions, which suggests recipes are being finished rather than abandoned.
You reach a safe extraction point with at least one gear in your inventory in a majority of your runs.
You re-read the workbench after a patch and adjust your plan without panic-selling the rest of your stash.

None of these signals is a hard threshold, and the right number depends on the player’s role and the current patch. They are useful as a sanity check, not as a goal. A player who hits all five is in a good place; a player who hits two of them probably has a specific weakness in their loop that is worth diagnosing rather than grinding through.

One signal that is easy to miss is how the player feels about the material. A player who dreads opening the workbench is a player whose plan has drifted away from the actual loop. The gear economy should feel like a set of small decisions, not a source of anxiety, and the signals above are partly a way to detect that drift early.

Open questions about rusted gears

Several points remain unclear, and it is better to name them than to fill the gap with guesswork.

The exact drop rate per container has not been published by Embark Studios, and any number circulating in community posts is an estimate, not a confirmed value.
The recipe list at the workbench is expected to change with future updates, and the recipes described here reflect the current technical test build rather than a finished economy.
Stash limits and stack sizes are still being adjusted, which means the storage pressure that affects gear management may shift in a future patch.
Any future player-to-player trading system would change the effective value of rusted gears, and no such system has been officially confirmed for launch.

Treating these as open questions is more useful than treating them as known facts. The design of an extraction shooter is iterative, and a material that looks stable today may move in the next patch. A player who builds their whole plan around a specific number is a player who will be wrong in a few weeks, and a plan that adapts to uncertainty will outlast a plan that does not.

There is also a broader uncertainty about how the wider game will treat materials like rusted gears. If Embark decides to add more workshop branches, or to fold mechanical recipes into a different crafting category, the role of the material could shift in ways that are hard to predict from inside the current build. Watching the patch notes carefully is the only real hedge against that kind of structural change.

Frequently asked questions

What are rusted gears in ARC Raiders?

Rusted gears are a tier-two mechanical salvage material used in weapon crafting, deployable equipment, and workshop upgrades. They are recovered from ARC machines, industrial containers, and mid-tier caches, and they act as the main mechanical crafting input between basic scrap and named endgame materials.

Where is the best place to farm rusted gears?

The most reliable sources are the cores of defeated ARC machines and the mechanical containers inside named industrial or research sites. A route that visits two or three named zones in a single run and prioritizes core salvage over random containers is more efficient than chasing every sound on the map.

Should I spend rusted gears on weapons or workshop unlocks?

Workshop unlocks are the safer first spend because they persist across patches, while consumable weapons can be rebalanced. Spend on a permanent unlock first, then build one complete weapon rather than two incomplete ones, and keep a small reserve in case a future update changes the recipe list.

Do rusted gears stack in the stash?

They stack, but not to the highest density available for basic materials. That is why storage pressure shows up quickly for gears, and it is the reason a personal cap per run is more useful than a single long farming session.

Are rusted gears tradeable with other players?

No player-to-player trading of rusted gears has been confirmed for the current technical test or the planned launch. Treat the material as a personal resource, and do not build a strategy that depends on a market that may not exist.

How many rusted gears do I need to fully kit a mid-tier weapon?

The exact count depends on the weapon and the current patch. The safe habit is to check the workbench recipe before starting a farm, because the number of gears, the supporting materials, and the workshop prerequisites all change with updates.

Will rusted gears become less useful after launch?

The material’s identity as a mid-tier mechanical input is likely to remain, but specific recipes will probably change. The recipes described here reflect the current technical test build, and a future update may add new weapons, remove older ones, or shift the role of gears toward a different craft branch.

Can I lose rusted gears if I die before extracting?

Yes. The extraction loop is built around the risk of losing anything in your inventory when a run ends without a safe extraction. This is the central tension of the genre and the reason a personal stash cap and a calm extraction plan are more useful than a greedy route.

Do rusted gears drop from player stashes during PvP encounters?

When a player is eliminated, their inventory drops in the field, and rusted gears in that inventory can be picked up. The exact drop behavior, including whether the gear returns to the original owner’s stash, is a design point that the technical test is still exploring, and players should expect the rule to be clarified in patch notes.

What is the difference between rusted gears and refined alloys?

Rusted gears are a mechanical input used for weapons, deployable equipment, and workshop unlocks. Refined alloys are a defensive input used for armor plating and protective modules. They sit in the same tier, but they support different parts of a build, and a balanced kit usually needs both.