Embark has put a date on the next ARC Raiders Expedition, and then immediately taken the mode away. The fifth Expedition’s departure window opens on September 8, 2026 at 11:00 UTC (1pm CEST / 4am PT) and closes on September 29 at 08:00 UTC. After that, Expeditions stop entirely and do not come back until early 2027.
That is not a soft pause dressed up as a content gap. Embark has been explicit that the system is coming apart for repairs. When Expeditions return, the studio says it will be with “major improvements, tackling some of the biggest player pain points” — which is a fairly direct admission that the current version has not landed the way it was meant to.
Expedition 5 is the longest one yet
Before the shutters come down, the fifth run is being given more room than any of its predecessors. The departure window has been stretched from two weeks to three, so there is a genuine buffer for anyone who cannot commit to a fixed fortnight. The trade-off is that there is no “last call” grace period this time: if you do not sign up inside the official window, you are not going.
The other headline change is one players have been asking for since the system launched. Quest progress no longer has to be wiped. Embark has made the reset opt-in, so you can carry your existing quest state forward instead of starting the board from scratch every cycle. It is a small-sounding tweak that removes one of the most common reasons people quietly stopped bothering with Expeditions at all.
Rewards for the run itself are:
- The complete Zenith Outfit
- Mystery rewards handed out along the track
- +12 stash space, up to a hard ceiling of 60 total
- Skill points, capped at 15 in total
- Consecutive buffs for XP, materials and repair value, capped at three levels
Those consecutive buffs are the important detail for anyone worried about the hiatus. They persist through the pause. Whatever ladder you have climbed by September 29 is still there when Expeditions come back, so skipping the fifth run costs you more than it looks like on paper.
What happens to your Caravan
The messier part is Caravans. Anything you have partially completed when the window closes gets converted into Ermal Vouchers of equivalent value, which you can then spend or sell. Embark has confirmed that Caravans themselves will be reset during the pause, so there is no sense in banking a half-finished one and hoping it survives into 2027.
Vouchers can go towards ARC Parts, firearm trades, Ermal’s offers, or straight coins. It is a reasonable conversion rather than a generous one — the point is that nobody loses value outright, not that anyone comes out ahead.
The rest of the game keeps running
It is worth being clear about what is and is not being switched off. Expeditions are one layer sitting on top of ARC Raiders; the extraction loop, the maps and the live updates are untouched. Update 1.42.0 landed on August 18 with part two of the Phantom Targets project, in which Shani traces the source of the phantom signals to erratic Wasps behaving in ways she has not seen before — strange noises, irregular flight patterns, unidentified tech, all of it converging on one location.
So the game is not going quiet. What is going quiet is the specific seasonal structure Embark built to give long-term players a reason to keep departing, and that is the thing the studio has now conceded needs more than a patch.
Reading between the lines
Live-service teams do not usually take a system offline for four or five months unless the alternative is worse. Embark could have shipped Expedition 6 in October, then 7 in November, and kept the cadence intact while quietly reworking things in the background. Choosing not to — and saying so publicly — suggests the team thinks the underlying design is the problem rather than the tuning.
The opt-in quest reset arriving in the final run before the pause reads like a preview of that thinking. The original Expedition design leaned hard on the fresh-start fantasy: wipe the board, climb it again, chase the buffs. That works beautifully for players who treat a seasonal reset as the point, and it works badly for everyone who just wanted to finish the quests they already had. Making the wipe optional is the first visible crack in that philosophy.
Three weeks is a long window, and the reward track is front-loaded with things that stick around — stash space, skill points, buffs that survive the hiatus. If you have been dipping in and out of ARC Raiders since launch, this is the run worth actually finishing, because the next one is a long way off and it will not be the same system when it gets here.
