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!"

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.