Fracture Line: a beginner’s guide to surviving your first ten raids

Fracture Line is an extraction shooter, which means the game is not about killing people. It is about leaving. Everything you carry in can be taken off your body, and the only score that matters is what makes it back through the door.

New players lose their first ten raids for one of two reasons: they bring too much, or they stay too long. Both are habits carried in from shooters where death costs you thirty seconds. Here, death costs you the kit, and the kit costs you the twenty minutes you spent earning it.

This guide assumes you have finished the tutorial contract and have access to two loadout slots. That is now the standard allocation for new accounts following the season seven changes, which we covered in our report on the Signal Pass loadout controversy. Two slots is enough. Everything below is built around it.

One framing note before the specifics: for your first ten raids, treat every run as a scouting trip that occasionally makes a profit. If you go in expecting to fight, you will take fights you do not need. If you go in expecting to learn a map, you will leave with both the knowledge and, more often than not, the loot.

Set up two loadouts and nothing else

Resist the urge to build a good kit. Build a cheap one you will actually take out, and one slightly better one for when you know the map.

The scout kit

• The starter carbine, unmodified. It is unfashionable and entirely adequate inside forty metres.
• Light armour only. Heavy plates slow your sprint recovery, which is the stat that gets you out.
• Two bandages, one splint. Skip the surgical kit; if you are hurt badly enough to need it, you should be leaving.
• A half-empty backpack. Space you do not fill is space you do not mourn.

The working kit

• Whatever weapon you have found and can afford to replace twice.
• Mid-weight armour, chest only. Helmets are a tax against headshots you will take anyway.
• Full medical. Take this kit only into a map you have already scouted.
• Lockpick or cutting torch, if the map’s high-value room needs one. Check before you deploy, not after.

Your first raid, step by step

Run this sequence on the same map five times before you try another one. Repetition on one map is worth more than variety across four.

1. Deploy with the scout kit and no plan to fight. Pick the quietest insertion point on the map rotation, which is almost always the one furthest from the central objective.
2. Walk for the first ninety seconds. Sprinting is audible across roughly sixty metres. The first ninety seconds is when everyone else is sprinting, which means it is when you can hear where everyone else is.
3. Loot the first two containers you find and then stop looting. Two containers is enough to cover the cost of the kit. Everything after that is profit you are risking a twenty-minute run to collect.
4. Move to within sixty metres of an extraction point and wait. Not on it — near it. Extraction points are the most contested ground on any map, and sitting on one is how you become someone else’s loot.
5. Listen for the extraction call. When the timer opens your point, count to fifteen before you move. The players who die at extraction are overwhelmingly the ones who move on the first note of the audio cue.
6. Leave with what you have. If you have space in your bag when you extract, you did it correctly.

The three habits that kill new players

These come up constantly, and all three are fixable in one session.

• Fighting for a body. Someone dies near you and you go to loot them. So does everyone else who heard it. A body in the open is bait whether or not anybody set it.
• Reloading in the open after a fight. Win an exchange, break line of sight, then reload. The second player is almost always ten seconds behind the first.
• Staying for the last five minutes. The final stretch of a raid concentrates every surviving player into the same few corridors. Whatever you were hoping to find, it is not worth being in that funnel.

When to move on from this guide

You are past the beginner phase when you can name three extraction points on your chosen map from memory, when you leave raids voluntarily with a half-full bag, and when you have started refusing fights you would probably win.

At that point the working kit becomes your default, the scout kit becomes what you take into unfamiliar maps, and the game opens up considerably. Contracts start being worth reading. Until then, keep it cheap, keep it short, and keep leaving.