Arc Raiders player asking to recycle rubber ducks accused of "blasphemy," and presumably blacklisted by famed duck collector: "You mess with the duck, you mess with all of us!"

Arc Raiders soldier holding assault rifle.

The speed at which the Arc Raiders community collectively adopted rubber ducks as an icon of the game, a beacon for all we fight for in the Rust Belt, never fails to make me laugh. Embark did some of the heavy lifting with the duck's item description – "Always there to lend an ear, should you need it" – but I wonder if even the developers anticipated this sort of devotion. Exhibit A: even mentioning the idea of recycling or salvaging the ducks for rubber parts will get you thrown out of Speranza faster than a raider can say "friendly."

This lesson was recently learned by Reddit user Velcr0Wallet, whose post in the Arc Raiders subreddit would make for useful evidence in a report by future historians on the game's strange duck religion. "Why on earth can't we break these down to rubber parts?" they wondered innocently.

The obvious answer is that rubber ducks are salvage-proof trinkets designed to be sold, thrown to spread the good word of the duck, or collected in the thousands by the truly devout, but the truth, some players would tell you, runs deeper.

"Can you break true love down into chemicals and hormones?" reasons checks notes SperginInSperanza. "Can you break the beauty of music into electromagnetic disturbances and electrical activity within the brain? Can you break God down? Maybe, but even if you could, why on earth would you want to? The Rubber Duck is the Rubber Duck."

"Don't listen to him! He is not in a right mind," another user says of the post.

"Blasphemy!" exclaims Valky9000. "Why would you ever want to?"

"You mess with the duck, you mess with all of us!" writes another.

The kernel of truth underneath all this is probably closest to this response from Kolby9241: "Those are relics of a day in which there was more prosperity. A gem of the old world. You can NEVER destroy them. Plus if you sit on them they make a cute noise." The ducks are one example of player behavior contributing to a game's culture and tone – a fascinating side effect of a world and sandbox like Arc Raiders'.

Selling the ducks is, of course, permitted, if only so that they might end up with someone who appreciates their true value. (I like to believe there's dozens of them keeping Scrappy company in his coop.) But destroying them? And for common rubber parts? Unthinkable. Unconscionable. Unforgivable.

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