For the first two seasons of Trials, a lot of Arc Raiders players simply didn’t bother. The competitive mode was there, the ranking system worked as advertised, and Embark Studios clearly put thought into the structure — but the rewards at the end of the grind never quite justified the effort. You’d spend weeks climbing the leaderboard, dodge squads that were farming objectives three times faster than you, and walk away with a recolor nobody wanted.
Season 3 is different. And if you’ve been sleeping on Trials since launch, now is the time to actually care.
The headline reward this season is The Torque — an exclusive outfit that looks like someone crossed an F1 racing suit with deep-space explorer gear. It doesn’t look like the typical Arc Raiders cosmetic, and that’s exactly why the community has responded to it the way it has. The season runs until April 29, 2026, which means you’ve still got time to earn it.
What Arc Raiders Trials Season 3 Is (And How It Works)
If you’ve never touched Trials before, here’s the short version: every week, you get five rotating objectives from the people of Speranza. These range from collecting medicinal plants to destroying specific ARC unit types to salvaging data from pre-collapse tech. Complete them during a raid, extract safely, and you earn points. Die before extracting, and you lose everything accumulated that run — your gear and your progress both.
Your weekly score puts you into a division of 100 Raiders at the same rank. The top performers move up. The bottom performers get pushed back down. It’s straightforward on paper, and in practice the “all-or-nothing” extraction mechanic adds a layer of tension to runs that’s genuinely different from standard raiding.
Only your best run for each Trial counts — bad attempts never reduce your progress. Division ranking is based on your total weekly score, not playtime. That matters more than it sounds. It means you can have a rough start to the week and still recover with a clean run later, rather than being permanently penalized for early mistakes.
Season 3 runs from March 3 to April 29, 2026 — nine weeks in total.
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The Rank Structure and Star Thresholds
There are three competitive ranks in Season 3 that most players will be working toward. Each has a star threshold that determines whether you’ve locked in a Torque colorway:
| Rank | Stars Required | Torque Reward |
|---|---|---|
| Rookie II | 1,000 stars (1★) | Base Torque outfit (red) |
| Daredevil | 2,500 stars (2★) | Alternate colorway |
| Hotshot | 4,000 stars (3★) | Highest variant + account recognition |
| Cantina Legend | Top 1,000 Hotshot players | Exclusive account recognition |
All versions are exclusive to Season 3 and cannot be obtained once the season ends April 29. There’s no second chance once the clock runs out.
Rookie II is genuinely accessible for most players. If you play a few sessions a week and complete your trial objectives consistently, hitting 1,000 stars doesn’t require you to no-life the mode. Daredevil and Hotshot are where the real competition starts — and where the solo vs. squad balancing issues that plagued earlier seasons become more relevant.
Why Seasons 1 and 2 Left Players Cold
To understand why Season 3 feels like a turning point, it helps to know what came before it.
Season 1 launched with Arc Raiders in October 2025 and ran for seven weeks. Players climbed ranks, hit Hotshot, reached Cantina Legend — and then got cosmetics that the community near-universally described as disappointing. The skin for reaching Daredevil 3 was described as “awful” by multiple players, and even those who pushed to Cantina Legend found the reward to be a poor recolor they’d never actually use.
Season 2 didn’t do much better. The Steam forums filled up with posts from players who’d spent weeks grinding only to feel like the payoff wasn’t there. The deeper problem wasn’t just the visuals — it was that the effort required to reach the top tiers felt genuinely disproportionate to what waited at the end.
Several players described Trials feeling like a second job, noting that for an average person, the rewards didn’t match the difficulty of climbing past Daredevil 1. Others stopped participating entirely, which directly reduced how much time they spent in Arc Raiders overall.
There were also legitimate structural criticisms. Solo players competing in the same pool as coordinated trios was a recurring complaint, with premade squads able to farm objectives significantly faster and reach point totals that solo players couldn’t realistically match. The timing exploit — where logging in late in the week and grinding hard for a few hours could beat consistent daily play — also frustrated players who felt consistency should be rewarded.
Embark heard all of this. Season 3 is the answer.
What Makes The Torque Outfit Actually Worth Chasing
The shift in tone around Season 3 is almost entirely down to The Torque, and it’s worth explaining why this skin hits differently than its predecessors.
The Torque is almost like an F1 spacesuit crossover — a breath of fresh air for players who wanted something less wacky-looking and more genuinely “cool.” Arc Raiders’ cosmetic library has always leaned into the scrappy, cobbled-together aesthetic of the Rust Belt, which makes sense for the setting. But a lot of players wanted something that felt polished and aspirational rather than improvised.
The Torque delivers that. The base version — unlocked at Rookie II — comes in bright red, which isn’t ideal for stealth on the surface but looks striking in the hideout. The Daredevil and Hotshot colorways are reportedly better suited to actual topside use, with darker palettes that don’t announce your position from a hundred meters.
The Torque set leans into an industrial aesthetic and pairs well with utility-heavy builds, and the multiple color variants ensure that even within the same reward tier, players can express individuality.
Crucially, the base version is genuinely achievable without treating the mode as a full-time commitment. For most players, Rookie II is a realistic target over the nine-week season window — especially compared to the Cantina Legend grind that earlier seasons dangled as the headline reward.
How to Actually Earn The Torque Before April 29
The practical path to The Torque isn’t complicated, but it does require consistency. Here’s what to focus on:
- Complete your weekly challenges every reset — Trials reset on Monday. Missing a full week hurts your star total and makes it harder to maintain rank when the leaderboard shuffles
- Prioritize high-density objective maps — some trial tasks (destroying specific ARC units, for instance) are much easier on maps with higher enemy concentrations; plan your runs accordingly
- Don’t push for completion if extraction is at risk — the all-or-nothing rule means a bad read on an escape route costs you everything accumulated that raid; banking a partial run is almost always better than gambling on one more objective
- Target map conditions that double your points — Night Raid, Electromagnetic Storm, Hidden Bunker, Locked Gate, and Cold Snap all grant double challenge points; if you have a choice, always pick a condition map
- If you’re a solo player, aim for Daredevil rather than Hotshot — competing against coordinated trios for top Hotshot positions is a significant investment; the Daredevil colorway is a strong reward that doesn’t require you to out-grind full squads
For most casual players, the path to Rookie II takes roughly 2–3 solid sessions per week across the nine-week season. For Daredevil, expect to push harder — but it’s still achievable without squad coordination if you’re consistent and smart about which objectives you prioritize.
The Bigger Problem Trials Still Hasn't Solved
Better rewards fix the “why bother” question. They don’t fix the structural issues that made the competitive side of Trials frustrating in the first place.
Solo players and squads still compete in the same pools, which means coordinated teams can farm objectives faster and reach point totals that solo players can’t realistically match. Embark hasn’t announced changes to matchmaking pools for Season 3. If you’re planning to push toward Hotshot or Cantina Legend as a solo player, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle against trios who can cover objectives simultaneously.
The timing loop is also still present. Players who save their serious grinding for late in the weekly window can still potentially out-score consistent players who spread their sessions throughout the week. It’s not a dealbreaker for most people playing at Rookie II or Daredevil level, but it becomes more noticeable the higher you climb.
None of this undermines what Season 3 has done well. A compelling reward makes people show up. Showing up makes the structural problems more visible — and more worth fixing. The community attention that The Torque is generating is probably the best thing that could happen to Trials in the long run, because it means more eyes on the mode and more feedback going to Embark.
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Is Season 3 of Arc Raiders Trials Worth It?
For the base Torque at Rookie II: yes, without hesitation. It’s a fairly easy task — you just need to reach Rookie II rank before the end of the season on April 29, 2026. If you play Arc Raiders with any regularity, you’ll hit that threshold naturally over the nine-week window.
For Daredevil and Hotshot: it depends on what you want from the game. If you enjoy optimizing your runs and competing on leaderboards, this is the most worthwhile Trials season yet — and the colorway unlocks at each tier give you a visible reward for the extra effort. If you play mostly solo and find squad competition frustrating, getting to Daredevil and holding there is a reasonable ceiling that still gets you a strong cosmetic outcome.
For Cantina Legend: only if you’re genuinely invested in being one of the top 1,000 players in the game. The recognition is real, but it requires consistent high-performance play across all nine weeks and direct competition with the most dedicated raiders in the pool.
The Torque doesn’t solve every problem with Trials. But it’s the first time since launch that the end of the Trials grind actually looks worth the journey — and that changes the calculation for a lot of players who’ve been sitting this mode out.
