The Rust Belt's freezing over again, but Arc Raiders isn't letting anyone hibernate. The Cold Snap update brought the Flickering Flames event, and it's the rare kind of seasonal grind that actually feels doable if you play a few nights a week. If you're trying to plan your runs and chase the right loot routes, I've been keeping the ARC Raiders BluePrint open on a second screen so I don't waste time wandering into dead zones.
The whole event runs from December 16, 2025 to January 13, 2026, and your progress is tied to Merit. In plain terms, you earn 10 Merit for every 1,000 XP you pull out of a raid. Looting junk, tagging ARCs, surviving with a full bag—anything that bumps XP helps. Each tier costs 600 Merit, and there are 25 tiers, so you're looking at 15,000 Merit for the full track. It sounds hefty, but the pace is forgiving if you're consistent, especially if you stop chasing "perfect" raids and just bank clean extracts.
The reward line starts with the Hi-Tech Hiker outfit, then drips out the pieces that make it feel like your own: little accessories like the Scanner and Field Phone, plus camo colorways that actually pop in snowy lighting. Blue and Orange show up along the way, and there's a sharp White option near the end that looks like it belongs in this update. Between those bigger hits, you'll keep getting Raider Tokens and Candleberries. Tokens are nice, sure, but Candleberries are the real bottleneck, because they're tied to the fastest Merit spike in the whole event.
If you want to move faster than the slow drip of raid XP, the Candleberry Banquet Project is where you lean in. It's split into 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 Candlelight stages, and it's basically "grab specific junk, don't die, turn it in." Stage 1 is straightforward—Empty Wine Bottle, Plastic Parts, Durable Cloth, and Candleberries—and the payout is huge: 2,000 Merit plus Firecrackers. Later stages get oddly picky, pushing you to hoover up stuff most players used to ignore, like Coffee Pots, Film Reels, Mushrooms, and Frying Pans. Finish Stage 5 and you're walking away with the Snowglobe backpack charm, along with gear that can genuinely help your next few raids, like a Bettina III and a Kinetic Converter.
The trick is playing like you're on a shopping list. Hit locations that spawn "trash" density, keep one stash tab dedicated to project items, and don't be precious about your route—reset fast if a raid goes sideways. A lot of folks lose hours trying to force hero fights when they could've extracted with a bag full of stage items and a chunk of Merit. Stack those project turn-ins with steady XP, and that final Space Wrench stops feeling like some impossible flex. If you're mapping out what to keep versus what to sell, it helps to check a BluePrint while you're sorting your haul so you don't accidentally dump something you'll need tomorrow.
