The new Headwinds update for Arc Raiders briefly caused top-tier weapons to become seemingly worthless thanks to a bug. As a result, one player recycled over 100 expensive Venator pistols at a bargain price.
On January 27, Headwinds was released, the first major update of the year for Embark’s acclaimed extraction shooter Arc Raiders. Among other things, the update brought a new matchmaking option for brave solo players, a new map condition with a focus on more verticality and treacherous birds, and significantly more cute collectible squeaky ducks to the game.
However, the patch also had some unforeseen effects and bugs that cost one player hundreds of valuable weapons.
First things first: The server problems of the past few days were probably not a result of the update, but rather the result of a DDOS attack on the servers of developer Embark. Their other multiplayer shooter, The Finals, was also affected by outages.
The first problem with the update concerns the speed at which loot appears in crates and containers. According to many players, this was significantly reduced with the release of Headwinds. The developers have since released a hotfix and report that they did indeed want to slow down the loot speed with the update—but not by a whopping 30 percent.
Weapons temporarily nerfed
The second unintended side effect of the Headwinds update was a bug that drastically reduced the fire rates of various weapons. Several previously top-notch high-fire-rate firearms, such as the Venator pistol, were suddenly rendered worthless. And this brings us to the expensive house cleaning mentioned at the beginning.
After the update, some players apparently thought that the nerfing of their weapons was permanent and began selling and recycling them—destroying a veritable in-game fortune within seconds. A video of a player dismantling over 100 Venator pistols into their individual parts in one fell swoop is currently making the rounds on Twitter, earning him both ridicule and pity:
RIP to the guy who recycled 109 Venator 4s because of yesterday’s accidental nerf.
Embark literally just reversed it 🤣
📽️nickmercs pic.twitter.com/KZBgvEovYo
— ARC Raiders PVP (@ArcRaidersPVP) January 28, 2026
The recycling proved to be a fatal mistake, because just a few hours later, developer Embark reversed the changes to weapon damage via a hotfix. These were an unintended side effect of the update, the developers said. on Discord. They thanked the community for the numerous quick reports of the problem.
