I have been hooked on ARC Raiders lately, the kind of hooked where you say you are logging off and then queue another raid instead, and that is how I ended up dumping a silly amount of coins into Power Rods to see if Night Raids or the new Cold Snap runs are better for profit when you also plan to buy Raider Tokens on the side.
Finding The Dam Loot Room
If you have not seen the Power Rod Loot Room on Dam Battlegrounds yet, it is hidden but not impossible to reach once you know the route, sitting under the Power Generation Complex on the east side of the map, and you usually have to drop down from the upper walkways, weave around those sentry turrets, and time your movement so the Rocketeer near the lift does not delete you before you even get to the door. Slotting an Epic Power Rod into the console pops open a compact vault, just a few lockers, tables, sometimes a fuel crate, and the nice thing is there is often an XL exfil point basically next door, so you can grab the loot, check your bag once, and get out before the patrols stack up.
Night Raid Runs And Profit
For the actual test I ran 20 Night Raids solo and tracked everything, spending about 5,000 coins per rod and going through 40 rods total, and the numbers from the night runs were kind of wild, with profit ending up a bit over 771,000 coins which works out at roughly 38,000 per raid if you do not die or whiff the room. The loot pool felt juiced in the dark, with multiple Wolfpack grenades dropping across the sample, a good handful of Tier 2 blueprints like Tempest and Renegade, plus a steady drip of high tier salvage that fills your stash quick, and I even had one run pushing past 90k profit by itself where it felt like every locker decided to roll max value at once.
Cold Snap Snow Runs
Cold Snap looked promising on paper, snow everywhere, outdoor piles shining, but when I did the same 20 runs for the Power Rod room only, the total was around 336,000 coins, not awful but way behind the night numbers, and you can tell the event buffs the open air loot more than these indoor vault tables because the room just does not hit the same jackpot vibe even when you survive the approach. The hypothermia mechanic is what really drags things down though, as you end up juggling body heat, timer pressure, and bag space all at once, so you are forced into specific mobility or survival perks and you get that annoying situation where you are freezing mid-loot, trying to decide which salvage to drop while your health ticks down.
When To Use Your Power Rods
After burning through 200,000 coins on rods and a bunch of late nights, my take is pretty simple, if you care about raw profit from this vault, you save your Epic rods for Night Raids because the loot feels riskier but clearly pays better, and you treat Cold Snap as more of a side thing for outdoor farming or if you just want a different look for a while. Power Rods are not cheap, so if your stash is running thin or you keep losing kits, it is totally fair to pad things out by picking up extra coins or blueprints from a site like u4gm, that way you can afford to keep chasing those crazy night runs without feeling like one bad death wipes your whole season.
