As good as Arc Raiders‘ first 2026 roadmap looks, one of the latest crazes in the online extraction shooter has nothing to do with hunting down other players or banding together against the oppressive robotic threat. People are collecting rubber ducks, lots of them.
Why focus on meaningless rubber loot over everything else? Let me preface this by saying everyone loves to find an excellent gun or blueprint, but upgraded stashes have a fun side effect which is that you can show off your favourite loot in the raider’s room. Embark Studios has also added collectible rubber ducks that you can find all over, making them the perfect collectibles. It reminds me of the short period when everyone was putting moais inside their lockers in Splatoon 3. Hilarious stuff.
You know an online game has the juice when players start wholesome trends like these and don’t spend all their time optimizing the fun out of it. Embark appears to aware of this saga, so Arc Raiders’ latest update, pushed on 3rd February, makes the Bird City map condition for the Buried City more common.
What does this mean exactly and how does it connect to the coveted rubber birds? Well, the new map condition dropped after the Cold Snap event which covered Speranza in snow. As part of the return to normalcy, birds are flocking back to the Buried City, and you can often queue into the Bird City version of it, which has more feathered animals and boosted loot rates; look for nests on top of chimneys too.
Birds (the real ones) aren’t your friends though. Like in other open-world games with strong stealth elements, they’ll fly away in large groups when approached and in response to loud noises. You can imagine why this is a problem in a game where everyone and everything on the surface can kill you in an instant.
Rubber ducks are part of the boosted loot during this map condition, however, so the new “for funsies” meta is raiding the Buried City over and over again to snatch all the different toys as if they were Arc Raiders’ version of limited-edition Funko Pops… or Tubbz.
In any case, it’s heartwarming to see players chasing anything other than endgame loot and more high risk, high reward experiences inside a game as tense as Arc Raiders. Maybe we can take Scrappy the Rooster topside soon, too. Let’s start pitching that.
