Last updated: 24 July 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:

• Top 30 of your division — Promoted two tiers at once (a 2x promotion).
• Positions 31–60 — Promoted one tier.
• Positions 61–100 — No promotion. At Rookie rank this simply means no progress; at any rank above Rookie, finishing this low can demote you a tier instead of just holding you in place, so a bad week isn't always risk-free once you're past the starting tier.

Because the top-30 jump is worth double, 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 milestones — reach 1,000, 2,500, and 4,000 points on that challenge to unlock an Uncommon, Rare, and Epic reward crate respectively. 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 5

As of late July 2026, ARC Raiders is running Trials Season 5: Prove Your Mettle, which started July 7, 2026 and is scheduled to run through September 30, 2026. The season is themed around the Riven Tides coastal map (added in Live Update 1.36.0) and centers its cosmetic track on the Scorta outfit as the headline seasonal reward.

Trials seasons use a soft reset, not a full wipe: you start the next season two tiers below where you finished the previous one, so a strong Season 4 finish still gives you a head start into Season 5 — it just doesn't carry over 1:1.

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.