ARC Raiders: the Season 3 Battle Pass guide — rewards, premium tier and 2026 cosmetics

On paper, ARC Raiders looks like any modern live-service game: an ongoing Season, exclusive cosmetics, weekly challenges to tick off. In practice, Embark Studios made a choice that's radically different from the competition: there is no premium Battle Pass costing 950 paid currency. Seasonal progression — the famous Season 3 — runs through a system called Trials, entirely free, but noticeably more competitive than the usual linear pass. Here's everything you need to know about the structure of Season 3, its tier-by-tier rewards, the actual role of premium content in ARC Raiders' economy, and the 2026 roadmap that followed.

Why ARC Raiders doesn't have a classic Battle Pass

This is the first thing to understand before diving into the tiers: Embark Studios chose not to sell a Fortnite- or Call of Duty-style seasonal pass. The studio made this clear at launch and reaffirmed it in the "Duo Matchmaking and Store Update" blog: the store is built around Raider Decks (cosmetic bundles), Raider Tokens (the premium currency), and Expeditions (long-term progression). There is no paid premium tier to unlock each Season.

Instead, the "Season 3" that shaped spring 2026 is Trials Season 3, a weekly competitive mode that began on March 3, 2026 and ended on April 28, 2026, right before the arrival of the Riven Tides update. This is where you earn the exclusive seasonal cosmetics — without spending a single cent. The trade-off, as we'll see, is that you have to earn each tier instead of paying for it.

Structure of the Trials Season 3

Each Trials Season lasts about eight weeks. Season 3 followed that pace: March 3 – April 28, 2026, with a weekly cycle that redistributes tasks and resets the partial leaderboard. Here's how the mechanics work overall:

• Each week, you're placed in a pool of 100 Raiders who share your rank level. Promotion or relegation happens within that pool.
• Tasks are graded with a three-tier star system. You need to hit the top rating to maximize your score.
• Progress on a challenge must be made in a single outing (raid). If you die, you lose both your gear and the accumulated progress on the task. This is the big differentiator from a classic battle pass: tiers can't be chipped away at passively.
• At the end of the Season, each player is awarded the cosmetics tied to their final rank. Higher tiers also inherit everything unlocked by the lower ranks.

The star and points system

Each weekly challenge offers three performance thresholds. The thresholds are officially documented by Embark and follow the "bronze / silver / gold" model found in many ranked modes:

Points only accumulate within a single run. A player who returns to shelter with 3,800 points on a medicinal plant collection challenge loses that progress toward the 4,000 mark if they head back out on a raid and get extracted by a Rocketeer before finishing the task. It's better to plan your routes so you can check off star 3 in a single clean round trip.

Season 3 Weekly Challenges

Season 3 introduced three major families of challenges, plus some one-off variants. Over the eight weeks, the official rotation featured:

• Medicinal plant harvesting — perfect for opportunistic runs early in a raid, provided you know how to spawn on the green biomes (Buried City, Dam Battlegrounds).
• Elimination of specific ARC units — targeted culling of certain families (Wasp, Bombardier, Leaper depending on the week). The final score climbs when you use the right weapon type against the right target, a mechanic that Season 5's Trials went on to make permanent.
• Pre-collapse data recovery — the "salvage" challenges require scanning or retrieving components at certain key POIs. This is where a player familiar with Stella Montis or Space Center gains a real advantage.

Season 4 then added melee, gadget-use, and container-looting challenges. For Season 3, the three families above covered the entirety of the weeks.

Tier-by-tier rewards

The big reward of Season 3 is the The Torque set, an outfit with a mechanic-industrial look that unlocks in pieces as you progress. Unlike a classic battle pass where each level opens a tier, Season 3 works by end-of-Season ranks. It's your position at the moment the leaderboard freezes, on April 28, 2026, that determines what you keep permanently. Here's the official breakdown:

The red Hotshot colorway is the Season's only true status marker: it's awarded solely to the upper fringe of the pool. Wildcard II and Daredevil I ranks form the sweet spot for most serious players: you walk away with a complete, playable The Torque set, two colorways, and all three outfit pieces (jacket, helmet, shoulder pad).

Is there a premium tier to buy?

No — and that's probably the most original feature of Embark Studios' model. No tier of the Trials Season 3 is unlockable with Raider Tokens or real money. The entire The Torque set is accessible in-game, provided you put in the necessary hours and finish in the right rank. This means two things:

• No tier skipping. You can't buy the last 20 levels of a pass like you can elsewhere. You progress through the sweat of your raids, or you don't progress at all.
• No paid exclusivity. A player who has never spent a euro can, in theory, finish the Season with the red Hotshot color and a full outfit. This is a stance Embark stands by, repeating that its premium Raider Decks contain no gameplay items — only cosmetics.

This choice contrasts sharply with the standard F2P market model. In return, the pace of progression is slower and more demanding: while a typical pass wraps up in 60-80 hours of relaxed play, reaching Hotshot requires a consistent investment across the Season's eight weeks, with several well-optimized sessions per week.

Raider Decks: ARC Raiders' real "premium" offering

If you're looking for the "I pay for cosmetic content" box, that's where the Raider Decks come in. The studio has activated several formats since launch:

• Free Deck — A complete cosmetic bundle offered to the entire community (for example The Goalie, distributed in December 2025). Free decks are the only ones that contain gameplay items.
• Premium Decks — Bundles purchased with Raider Tokens contain only outfits, backpacks, charms, emotes, and Scrappy cosmetics. Nothing that impacts combat.
• Rotating shop — Shop updates (1.32, 1.34, 1.35, 1.37…) introduce variants of already existing outfits — like the Red and Black/Green colorways of the Driftcoat in July 2026 — often automatically redistributed to players who already own the base skin.

So this is where the real budget gets spent. But none of these purchases are essential to finishing Season 3 or unlocking The Torque: the two economies are deliberately kept separate.

XP progression: the role of Expeditions

Alongside the Trials, ARC Raiders offers a second seasonal progression track: Expeditions. This is where the permanent account rewards live — skill points, stash extensions, persistent cosmetics — the kind of things you'd normally find in a premium battle pass.

The Second Expedition (February 2026), for instance, offered an evolved Patchwork set with four new toggles and two colorways, +12 stash slots (bringing the total to 24), and 5 additional skill points. The Fourth Expedition (July 2026) unlocks the first tier of the Zenith outfit, +12 additional stash slots (48 total), and turns rewards into temporary Blueprints plus Raider Tokens, distributed based on damage dealt during the opening window.

The damage thresholds for the Fourth Expedition's Mystery Rewards are set at 5,000, 10,000, 30,000, 50,000, then 100,000 points. Complete this system alongside the Trials: the two progression tracks coexist without stepping on each other, and combined they almost exactly replicate the effect of a premium battle pass… for free.

Which tiers are really worth the effort?

Of the six reward tiers in Season 3, not all carry the same value. Here's our ranking based on the effort-to-reward ratio:

1. Rookie II — The bare minimum goal, reached within the first week if you play just four evenings. The Orange colorway already gives you a recognizable silhouette in raid.
2. Tryhard I then Tryhard III — The sweet spot for a regular player. You get the jacket and the helmet, which is 80% of The Torque's visual read. This should be your priority target.
3. Wildcard II — Adds the shoulder pad and unlocks the full combo. Requires two or three extra evenings of effort compared to Tryhard III.
4. Daredevil I — A big step up: this is the first "competitive" tier. You get the Yellow/Grey colorway here, very different from the base Orange, and a real external sign of commitment.
5. Hotshot — Reserved for the top 5-10% of the pool. The reward (Red colorway) is purely a status symbol. Only aim for this if you're playing several hours a day.

For a player who only has one two-hour session per evening, the Wildcard II + Daredevil I combo offers the best time-to-reward ratio. Beyond that, the climb to Hotshot gets noticeably steeper.

After Season 3: Season 4, Season 5 and beyond

Season 3 ended on April 28, 2026 and immediately rolled into Season 4 on April 29, aligned with the Riven Tides update. Three structural changes appeared right from Season 4:

• Trials remain available during Expedition windows — this wasn't the case in Season 3.
• Map conditions no longer grant doubled points.
• Challenges have become more varied (melee, gadgets, container looting).

Season 4's main reward is the Blindspot set (beach theme), unlocked as early as Tryhard I. Season 5, currently underway since July 7, 2026 and running until September 30, revolves around the The Scorta set, with a Green Bruiser backpack, the Pressure Gauge charm, the Hydraulic Pump attachment, and the Come at me emote. The Red and Blue colorways remain reserved for Hotshot and the new Cantina Legend rank, respectively.

The overall 2026 roadmap

The "Escalation" blog post (January 2026) set the framework for the year: new enemies, new maps, new weather conditions, monthly updates. Since then, every major patch (Shrouded Sky, Flashpoint, Riven Tides) has expanded the Trials calendar without ever introducing a premium battle pass. Embark's message is clear: the Season, as a separately sold product, is not in the plans for the short term.

This could change if the current model runs out of steam — but for now, the economy rests on three stable pillars: Trials for competition and seasonal cosmetics, Expeditions for account progression, and Raider Decks for the shop.

Conclusion

ARC Raiders' "Season 3 Battle Pass" doesn't exist in the usual sense of the term — and that's precisely what makes it interesting. The Trials' Season 3 (March 3 – April 28, 2026) offers the The Torque set and its colorways to anyone able to climb the ranks, without ever asking for a single cent. Aim for Wildcard II for a complete set, Daredevil I if you want the exclusive Yellow/Grey colorway, and Hotshot only if you're ready to play the Season at a high level. On the shop side, save your Raider Tokens for the Raider Decks you like the look of: Embark guarantees they contain no gameplay advantage. See you in Season 5 to try for the Blue colorway of the Scorta set, available until September 30, 2026 for the rare few who reach Cantina Legend.