Week 10’s Trials Look Simple – But They Say a Lot About ARC Raiders’ Direction
On the surface, Week 10’s Trials in ARC Raiders look like more of the same: kill certain enemies, interact with specific objectives, earn better loot as you hit higher star thresholds.
Look a little closer, though, and this batch quietly shows how Embark is tuning ARC Raiders into a more playful, more directed live-service game – and how a single snowball-themed challenge hints at the studio’s broader strategy for keeping players engaged Topside long after the novelty of extraction wears off.
The headline twist this week is obvious:
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You’re not asked to destroy Rocketeers.
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You’re asked to throw snowballs at them.
No damage, no direct kill requirement – just pelt flying death machines with frozen fluff while the rest of the battlefield tries to erase you.
It’s a joke, yes. It’s also smart design.
How Trials Fit Into ARC Raiders’ Progression Economy
Before getting into snowballs, it’s worth grounding what Trials actually do for the game.
Every Monday, Embark drops five new Trials, each with three star tiers:
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1 star → Uncommon item
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2 stars → Rare item
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3 stars → Epic item
Beyond that, your overall ranking across the season can generate even more rewards, so Trials aren’t just side quests – they’re a second progression track that sits alongside normal scavenging runs Topside.
Functionally, Trials:
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Point players at specific content (enemy types, biomes, systems) that they might otherwise ignore.
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Offer predictable, time-limited goals in a game built around unpredictable runs.
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Create a weekly login incentive without resorting to daily chore lists.
Week 10 leans into all of that, but in a more deliberate way than most prior weeks.
The Week 10 Lineup: What Embark Is Really Asking You To Do
The five objectives are:
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Throw snowballs at Rocketeers
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Deal damage to Shredders
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Deal damage to flying ARC enemies
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Open ARC Probes
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Destroy Fireballs
Taken literally, it’s a grab bag of tasks. Taken as design, it’s a carefully constructed route through different parts of ARC Raiders’ sandbox.
1. Snowballs & Rocketeers – Forcing You Into a Specific Weather Condition
Snowballs only exist under the Cold Snap condition. That immediately means:
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You can’t brute force the snowball objective anywhere you like.
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You’re being gently funneled into snow-covered maps and encouraged to treat them as this week’s “main stage.”
The game makes you:
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Queue into a Cold Snap mission.
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Spot patches of snow on the ground.
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Interact with them to add snowballs to your quick slot.
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Use them like any other throwable – except they deal no damage.
The requirement is not “kill Rocketeers with snowballs,” which would be maddening. It’s just “throw snowballs at them”, meaning Embark is purely tracking interaction, not combat success.
That matters. It turns the Trial into:
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A prompt to engage with a seasonal, cosmetic-feeling mechanic that might otherwise be ignored.
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A social joke – players literally throwing snow in the middle of tense firefights.
But it’s also quietly teaching: “if you care about optimization, you’ll start checking weather conditions and adapting your run plan accordingly.”
2. Shredders & Flying ARC – Synergy With Real Combat
The other two combat-related Trials are more conventional:
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Deal damage to Shredders (ground-based, vicious enemies)
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Deal damage to flying ARC enemies
Paired with the Rocketeer snowball objective, Embark is nudging players to:
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Engage with air threats, not just ignore them or hope someone else handles anti-air.
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Gravitate toward maps like Stella Montis, where Shredders are plentiful.
There’s subtle synergy here:
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Snowball a Rocketeer → immediately swap to real weapons → progress both the snowball trial and the flying ARC damage trial in a single encounter.
You get a goofy moment that still feeds into meaningful progression.
3. Probes & Fireballs – Making Ignored Objects Suddenly Valuable
The last two Trials are about objects many players often treat as optional:
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ARC Probes – loud, time-consuming to breach, easy to skip if you’re on a tight extraction clock.
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Fireballs – projectiles that can be shot, but aren’t always prioritized.
The Trials reframe them:
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Opening Probes becomes a tracked, reward-linked objective, turning a “do we really want to bother with this?” debate into “we’d better, it’s part of this week’s loot plan.”
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Destroying Fireballs (not just damaging them) forces players to actually finish those targets, reinforcing target discipline and situational awareness.
Again, the common thread is clear: Embark is using Trials as a steering wheel, subtly rotating the player base toward underused systems and behaviors.
Technical Layer: Conditions, Tracking, and Why One Trial Is Easy to Mess Up
From a systems perspective, Week 10 also underlines how much state the game has to track behind the scenes.
To make these Trials work, ARC Raiders must:
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Recognize when a mission is under Cold Snap, enabling snowball spawns.
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Flag Rocketeers, Shredders, Fireballs, and flying ARC as distinct categories for damage and interaction tracking.
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Tie Probe opens and Fireball destruction to your account’s Trial progress, not just the local match state.
The one Trial you genuinely can “mess up” is the snowball one, and not because it’s hard in combat terms. You can fail it by:
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Spending multiple sessions in non-Cold-Snap conditions, never realizing you needed to queue into the right weather.
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Forgetting to actually pick up snowballs, then wondering why your Rocketeer encounters aren’t counting.
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Treating the snowball mechanic as pure flavor and never engaging with it all week.
The other Trials are much more forgiving:
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Shredders and flying ARC are widespread.
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Probes and Fireballs appear in multiple runs if you’re not rushing straight to extraction.
Snowballs, by contrast, are condition-gated and require a bit of premeditation. That’s exactly why they become the “don’t screw this one up” challenge – if you ignore the weather mechanic until late in the week, you may end up scrambling to find a Cold Snap map when everyone else has already moved on.
Impact on Players: Behavior, Meta, and Social Dynamics
For players, this week’s design has a few knock-on effects.
1. More Varied Run Planning
Instead of just spamming your favorite route, you have reasons to:
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Target Cold Snap missions at least a few times.
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Favor Stella Montis for Shredder farming.
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Say “yes” to Probes when a teammate suggests hitting one.
That variety doesn’t just stop things feeling stale; it helps newer players see a wider cross-section of what ARC Raiders offers.
2. Encouraging Co-Op Moments
Snowballing Rocketeers is inherently silly. It’s the kind of objective that:
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Sparks impromptu snowball fights between players when there’s a lull in combat.
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Leads to light-hearted callouts: “Tag that Rocketeer before we nuke it!”
In a genre often dominated by sweaty optimization, tying part of the week’s rewards to something deliberately unserious is a way to make lobbies feel a bit more human.
3. Spotlight on Underused Skills
Destroying Fireballs and consistently tagging flying ARC forces players to:
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Look up more often
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Prioritize threats that aren’t just in their immediate face
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Consider loadouts that can comfortably handle both ground and air
For long-term health, that’s good. A player base that actually engages with the full threat profile makes balancing future enemies less of a nightmare for Embark.
What Week 10 Suggests About ARC Raiders’ Future
Week 10’s Trials aren’t just one more checklist. They hint at where Embark might be taking the game next.
1. Seasonal Mechanics Will Likely Keep Getting Integrated
Cold Snap clearly isn’t just a visual filter. The snowball objective implies:
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Future weather or condition systems could come with mechanically relevant interactions.
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Trials will likely be used as the vehicle to teach and reinforce those mechanics.
If Embark adds storms, radiation pockets, or other environmental quirks later, expect them to show up in Trials before they become critical in high-end encounters.
2. Trials as a Soft Answer to “Repetitive” Complaints
Some players already call Trials repetitive; others like the structure. Week 10 splits the difference:
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Four Trials that are classic “do X to Y enemy/object” directives.
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One playful twist that reframes how you interact with a familiar threat.
That balance is likely to be the long-term pattern: mostly straightforward, with one or two weekly objectives that add flavor or highlight underused features.
3. A Testbed for Enemy and Object Design
By tracking how quickly players clear specific Trials, Embark gets:
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Data on which enemies are being engaged and where.
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Signals about which objects (like Probes) players still avoid even when rewarded.
That feedback loop can inform:
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Where to put future enemy types.
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Which map conditions need tuning.
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How aggressive they can be with objective complexity in later seasons.
The Bottom Line: Pay Attention to the Weather
For ARC Raiders players, the practical takeaway is simple:
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Don’t sleep on Cold Snap this week.
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Grab snowballs, tag Rocketeers, then swap to real firepower to farm flying ARC damage.
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Hit Shredders on Stella Montis, destroy Fireballs fully, and stop skipping Probes.
For everyone watching the game’s evolution, Week 10’s Trials are a neat snapshot of Embark’s live-service playbook: light-hearted on the surface, quietly manipulative in how it nudges behavior, and tightly bound to a weekly cadence that keeps players checking in.
It’s just a snowball fight – and also a clear sign of how ARC Raiders intends to keep you coming back Topside.
