Last updated: 19 October 2026

ARC Raiders Trials Guide How Weekly Trials & Ranks Work

Trials is ARC Raiders' weekly ranked mode — five rotating challenges, a 100-player division leaderboard, and a 14-tier rank ladder that runs from Rookie up to the server-wide Cantina Legend title. It's the game's main structured endgame loop once you've got the beginner basics down, and the scoring, promotion, and reward rules aren't explained anywhere in-game beyond a short tooltip. This guide breaks down exactly how it works.

01How to Unlock Trials

Trials unlocks once your Raider reaches Level 15. Below that, the Trials tab in the main menu stays locked. There's no separate quest or purchase required — hit the level and the tab opens automatically.

Once unlocked, you're given five Trials Challenges every week, visible in the Trials menu. Each challenge tracks a specific in-raid objective — things like dealing damage with a weapon category, destroying ARC units, or collecting specific loot — and your progress toward it only counts on raids where you extract successfully. Die or fail to extract and that run's progress toward the challenge doesn't count, though it also doesn't cost you anything already banked.

02Divisions and the Weekly Leaderboard

The moment you earn at least one point in a Trials challenge for the week, you're placed into a division of 100 Raiders, all at the same rank as you. Everyone in that division is ranked by their combined score across the five weekly challenges, and only your best score on each individual challenge counts — a bad run never drags your total down.

Where you land in your 100-player division at the end of the week decides whether you rank up, and by how much. The broad shape at Rookie rank is: top 30 promotes you two tiers at once, positions 31–60 promote you one tier, and positions 61–100 mean no promotion. The exact cutoffs get more competitive the higher you climb — at higher rank tiers the top bracket for a promotion narrows, so don't assume the same 30/60 split holds once you're past Rookie; check your division screen for the current thresholds at your tier.

At Rookie rank, landing in the bottom bracket (61–100) simply means no progress. At any rank above Rookie, finishing that low can demote you a tier instead of just holding you in place, so a bad week isn't risk-free once you're past the starting tier. Because the top bracket's promotion is worth more, strong early-season weeks matter — building a rank lead makes it progressively harder for lower divisions to catch up before the season ends.

03Every Rank Tier, Rookie to Cantina Legend

Trials uses a 14-tier ladder. The first four tiers each have three sub-ranks (I, II, III); the top two do not:

1. Rookie I–III
2. Tryhard I–III
3. Wildcard I–III
4. Daredevil I–III
5. Hotshot (single tier)
6. Cantina Legend — reserved for the top 1,000 Hotshot-rank players on the entire server

Cantina Legend isn't a rank you climb into by clearing a points threshold — it's a live global leaderboard position, so holding it means staying inside the top 1,000 Hotshot players worldwide, not just clearing your division.

04Rewards: Weekly Crates vs. Season Cosmetics

Trials pays out on two separate tracks, and it's easy to conflate them:

• Per-challenge crates (weekly): Each of the five challenges has its own progress bar with three escalating point milestones, unlocking an Uncommon, then a Rare, then an Epic reward crate as you cross each one (the first milestone sits around 1,000 points; exact thresholds have shifted between seasons, so check the in-game challenge screen for this week's numbers). These are claimed automatically after a successful extraction and reset with the weekly challenge rotation.
• Division rank (seasonal): The rank you're sitting at when the season ends determines the cosmetic rewards you receive — outfits, weapon/gear variants, and other purely visual items with no stat effect. These are separate from the weekly crates and only pay out once, at season close.

Because seasonal cosmetic rewards are based on your rank at season close rather than your peak, reaching Cantina Legend mid-season isn't enough on its own — you need to still be holding it (or close to it) when the season timer runs out.

05Current Season: Trials Season 6 — Frozen Trials

ARC Raiders is currently running Trials Season 6: Frozen Trials, which launched October 8, 2026 alongside the Frozen Trail (2.0) content update and is scheduled to run through January 12, 2027. Its challenges are built around the new Pendola Pass map, and its cosmetic track centers on the Maestro outfit (described by Embark as the season's "grand prize") as the headline seasonal reward — top placements also unlock a Sheriff Badge charm, an Infrared Transmitter backpack attachment, a Pumped Dance emote, and a Pop Helmet Scrappy outfit. The previous season, Season 5: Prove Your Mettle (built around Riven Tides and the Scorta outfit), ran through late September 2026.

Trials seasons have historically used a soft reset rather than a full wipe — starting the next season a couple of tiers below where you finished the previous one — so a strong Season 5 finish should still give you a head start into Season 6. We couldn't confirm the exact Season 6 reset amount from official sources at the time of writing, so treat the in-game season-transition screen as the source of truth for your starting rank.

06Tips for Climbing Trials Faster

• Extraction is non-negotiable. A perfect run that ends in death contributes zero challenge progress. If a challenge run goes sideways, disengage and extract with whatever partial progress you have rather than pushing for a bigger number you might not bank.
• Check all five challenges before you drop. Some challenges overlap naturally with a single loadout (e.g. a shotgun-kills challenge and a general-ARC-kills challenge both reward the same run), so plan your loadout around whichever combination clears the most challenges per raid.
• Push hard in your first week of a division. Since only your top-30 finish gives the double promotion, an early strong week compounds — you're facing a division of players who haven't yet had a chance to build a scoring lead either.
• Don't sweat a stagnant week at Rookie. Landing in positions 61–100 while you're still Rookie costs you nothing beyond a wasted week. Once you're past Rookie, though, a bottom-of-division finish can knock you back a tier, so treat a rough week as a warning sign, not a free pass.