Arc Raiders’ Ammo Duping Exploit Is The Worst It’s Ever Seen

Poor Arc Raiders, after having a pretty smooth run from launch until the end of 2025, has since started springing leaks faster than developers Embark Studios can plug them up. After cheating scandals and item-duplication glitches that have been pissing off its player base, it now seems the latest update has introduced both a weapon-repairing glitch and a way to make infinite ammo. And worse, they’re both incredibly easy to pull off.

Usually when we see reports of a new way of glitching something in an online game, it turns out to be an action so complicated that only the most elite and dedicated players would ever even try. Unfortunately, that’s very much not the case in the latest issues to plague the excellent extraction shooter. It’s as simple and clicking back and forth in your inventory, then dropping and picking up weapons. And that means everyone’ll be doing it.

Brought to wide attention by X user @genos, both the weapon-fixing and ammo-generating glitches use much the same technique. If you have a couple of worn weapons and want them repaired, all you need to do is rapidly switch them between your two weapon slots and for some reason their numbers start to climb. To make this stick, you then need to drop the weapon on the floor and pick it up again.

Weapons wear down in Arc Raiders in order to prevent players from being able to overly rely on a particularly expensive, particularly powerful choice, which would reduce the sense of danger when on a raid. It’s a crucial part of the game’s already shaky balance, as much as it might annoy a player in the moment. As such, being able to fix up the most costly, most dangerous guns means people are able to become significantly overpowered, stepping over systems designed to keep things in check.

This is then made worse by the accompanying glitch, where those constantly top-notch weapons also need never run out of bullets to fire. Again, the top-tier arms have very scarce, expensive ammo, designed to restrict use and prevent domination. But by swapping weapons over, not only do they get repaired, but they’ll also fill an ammo slot. Do this, drop the weapon, pick it up, unload it, drop the ammo and pick that up again, and it’s yours to keep. And yes, this is much more cumbersome, and hardly useful for a rapid-fire automatic weapon, but when it comes to something like a Hullcracker with its super-rare explosive projectiles, it’s a huge issue. And it gets far worse.

It turns out if you use the swapping trick on guns like the Anvil and the Venator, you end up with 102 bullets loaded in guns that are supposed to only hold six and 22 bullets respectively. You can also get the 35-bullet rapid-firing Bobcat to load itself with 102 rounds, which is wildly OP. In a shoot-out, this is obviously a massive advantage, and unlike the ammo-duping glitch above, it’s trivially easy to do. Given that, who wouldn’t load up with 102 bullets, even if they’re just trying to take on the machines?

It’s worth noting that Arc Raiders doesn’t have anything like betwixt-player trading markets, so no one’s getting taken advantage of by these schemes, and as such there’s no internal economy that’s broken by such exploits. (There is unofficial trading in-game, where you can swap out items with people you encounter, and this can be exploited for ill gains, but it’s not going to cause major harm.) The issue is far more about an individual player’s progress being artificially boosted, with them able to sell ammo to in-game traders for extra cash, and especially for PVP players getting far better equipped when battling other people.

I imagine we’ll see an emergency hotfix rolled out pretty sharpish, but in the meantime, perhaps focus on the freshly released Shared Watch event where players are encouraged to work together to fight the machines. And remember, the game’s matchmaking deliberately assigns you to games with players of a similar temperament, so if you’re PVP-averse, you’re far more likely to be put into lobbies with raiders of a similar nature.