You can blaze through Arc Raiders’ Lance quests if you route Doctor’s Orders (and Mixtape) like this

Why Lance’s Quests Matter (and Why Doctor’s Orders Feels So Awkward)

After a few evenings banging my head against early raids in Arc Raiders, Lance’s quests were where everything finally clicked for me. They look simple on paper-just grab a few medical supplies or collectibles-but in practice I was wasting entire runs in the wrong buildings, overfighting, and extracting with half the items I needed.

This guide breaks down the most confusing one, Doctor’s Orders, and shows how the same approach carries you through the rest of Lance’s quest chain, including straightforward follow-ups like Lance’s Mixtape and medical loot contracts later on. Once you learn to route Doctor’s Orders properly, the rest of his jobs become 15-20 minute errands instead of frustrating multi-session grinds.

Core Rules for All of Lance’s Quests (Mixtape, Doctor’s Orders, and More)

Before diving into Doctor’s Orders, there are a few habits that helped me across every Lance quest I’ve done:

• Play for mobility, not kills. Lance’s quests are scavenging-focused. I stopped bringing heavy armor and slow guns and instead ran a light primary, one backup, and minimal armor. Moving faster meant fewer fights and more completed objectives.
• Always check your stash before accepting. The game credits any quest items you already own the moment you accept the quest. More than once, I had a syringe or durable cloth lying around and completed part of the objective instantly just by picking the quest up.
• Plan your extractions before you drop. On maps like Dam Battlegrounds, I open the map (M on keyboard) the second I land, spot nearby extraction zones, and mentally commit to one. That way I’m not panicking with a full backpack when the storm tightens.
• Treat raids as errands, not adventures. When I’m on a Lance quest, I ignore 90% of combat and distractions. If it’s not on the quest checklist or directly on my route, I skip it.
• Use your first few runs to learn buildings. Buried City hospital, testing annexes, flooded lower floors-once you know these layouts, every future “loot X” quest gets dramatically easier.

Keep those in mind as we go through Doctor’s Orders, because they’re exactly what you’ll lean on later when you’re, say, grabbing collectibles for Lance’s Mixtape or running his higher-tier medical contracts.

Doctor’s Orders – Quest Overview and Why It’s Tricky

Doctor’s Orders is one of Lance’s early quests and it’s deceptively simple. You need to bring him:

• 1 × Syringe
• 2 × Antiseptic
• 1 × Durable Cloth
• 1 × Great Mullein

On my first attempts I treated it like a random loot quest and just “played normally” hoping I’d stumble over everything. That’s how I turned what can be a 15-20 minute job into three full evenings.

The breakthrough came when I realized two things:

• Three of the four items (syringe, antiseptic, durable cloth) reliably come from one building: Buried City Hospital.
• Great Mullein is basically a Dam Battlegrounds specialty, with a heavy bias toward the western / left side of the map and flooded annex areas.

Once I routed a clean two-raid loop around those points, I stopped failing the quest entirely. Here’s that route, step by step.

Step 1 – Prep Before You Even Accept Doctor’s Orders

This sounds silly, but it’s huge:

• Open your stash/inventory in Speranza.
• Look for any syringe, antiseptic, durable cloth, or great mullein you might have looted earlier.
• Only then go to Lance and accept Doctor’s Orders.

If you already own some of those items, the quest auto-updates immediately. I’ve had runs where I only needed to grab the herb because everything else was sitting in my stash from casual looting.

For your loadout, I recommend:

• One accurate mid-range weapon with decent ammo (something you’re comfortable landing headshots with).
• Light armor or whatever keeps your weight low—speed matters more than soaking damage.
• One healing item and maybe a shield recharger, but don’t overpack. You want bag space for medical loot.

I run this solo and it’s perfectly manageable; a squad can make it safer, but it’s not required.

Step 2 – Hit Buried City Hospital First (3 Items in One Run)

Your first raid should almost always be Buried City, heading straight for the hospital. This one building can give you:

• The 1 × Syringe
• Up to or more than 2 × Antiseptic
• The 1 × Durable Cloth

What finally worked for me was looting the hospital in a consistent pattern instead of running around randomly:

• Start at the ground floor and clear all medical bags, med crates, and cabinets. Syringes and antiseptic love these containers.
• Move floor by floor, always finishing a whole ring or corridor before going up or down. That way you don’t miss side rooms.
• Check lockers, drawers, and supply crates for durable cloth. It doesn’t just drop in medical containers; it can be in more generic loot as well.

If the hospital is dry (RNG can be mean), don’t panic. Sometimes the antiseptics or cloth are sitting in nearby Buried City buildings, especially residential and small clinics. If I’m missing just one antiseptic, I do a quick sweep of 2–3 surrounding structures, then extract instead of overcommitting to a bad raid instance.

Optional backup: If your workshop’s refiner is unlocked and upgraded, you can also craft some of these:

• Antiseptic can be refined from chemicals plus great mullein (check your exact recipe in the refiner menu).
• Durable cloth has its own refiner recipe if you’d rather burn base materials than hunt another hospital.

I usually only bother with crafting if I’m unlucky two raids in a row—most of the time, one good hospital clear gives me everything but the herb.

Step 3 – Farm Great Mullein on Dam Battlegrounds

Great Mullein is where I got stuck the longest. I kept looking in the wrong map and wondering why I never saw the plant. It’s effectively a Dam Battlegrounds exclusive, and the spawns are biased toward the western/left side of the map.

My consistent solo route looks like this:

• Drop into Dam Battlegrounds and angle your landing toward the left/western half of the map.
• Head for the testing annex buildings—the industrial structures near flooded or partially submerged areas.
• Quickly sweep the upper floors for any remaining medical loot (you can sometimes score extra antiseptic or syringes here).
• Then descend into the lower, water-covered floors. This is where I see Great Mullein most often: along walls, corners, and near debris.

Great Mullein shows up as a harvestable plant at ground level (sometimes near tree bases, sometimes as low shrubs). Walk up and interact to collect it. Once you know what it looks like in your game, your eye will start catching it instantly on later raids.

If you’re really unlucky and don’t see any in your usual loop, don’t waste the whole raid. Do a second sweep along the southwestern side of the map, then extract and requeue. In my experience, two Dam raids max is enough to find more than you need.

Safety net options:

• Traders like Celeste sometimes sell Great Mullein, antiseptic, syringes, and cloth for seeds. If you’re sitting on currency and just want the quest done, buying them is absolutely valid.
• If you’re short on antiseptic more than herbs, remember you can turn chemicals + Great Mullein into antiseptic in the refiner—so grabbing extra herbs on these runs is never wasted.

Step 4 – Extract Cleanly and Turn In to Lance

This is the part where I used to throw runs away: I’d get greedy after finding the last item and push for one more fight or chest. Don’t make that mistake. Once you have:

• 1 × Syringe
• 2 × Antiseptic
• 1 × Durable Cloth
• 1 × Great Mullein

…open your map (M) and bee-line to the nearest extraction. If another squad is between you and that evac, it’s usually better to rotate wide than to fight over it with a backpack full of quest items.

Back in Speranza, talk to Lance and hand everything in. You’ll walk away with a nice stack of healing consumables and shield recharge items plus better standing with him, which is what unlocks stronger blueprints and later quests.

How This Helps with Lance’s Mixtape and Later Quests

Once I’d routed Doctor’s Orders this way, the rest of Lance’s jobs got dramatically easier. Quests like Lance’s Mixtape and the follow-up container-looting missions lean on the same ideas:

• You’re still moving between a few key hotspots (often Buried City, Dam Battlegrounds, or testing annexes).
• Objectives are scattered but predictable: either marked collectibles (for story/lore-type tasks) or specific loot types in known building classes.
• The real difficulty is pathing and extraction, not combat. Speed and awareness win more than raw firepower.

What I do for any new Lance quest now:

• Identify which map and building type is most relevant (hospital, annex, residential blocks, etc.).
• Plan a two- or three-stop route that always ends near an extraction.
• Run the first attempt mostly for information: learn spawn tendencies, enemy patrols, and shortcuts.
• On my second run, I play like it’s a scheduled delivery job—no side trips, just pure objective focus.

If you approach Lance’s Mixtape and “and more” quests with that same mindset, they stop feeling like random grinds and start feeling like puzzle routes you can optimize.

Common Mistakes (I Made All of These)

• Overfighting: Treating every encounter as a must-win fight instead of slipping around squads. Remember: if you die, the loot and quest progress in that raid go with you.
• Ignoring weight and capacity: Bringing too many guns or armor pieces so you can’t carry enough meds. Doctor’s Orders, especially, lives or dies on inventory space.
• Looting blindly: Running through Buried City looting whatever instead of prioritizing hospitals and clinics. Targeted looting is always better than random scavenging.
• Staying after finishing the checklist: Greed kills. Once your quest items are in your bag, extraction is the only objective that matters.
• Not using crafting or traders as a backup: I wasted time hard-farming items I could have just refined or bought for a few seeds.

Wrap-Up – From Struggle to 20-Minute Errand

Doctor’s Orders went from being the quest that stalled my early Arc Raiders progress to something I now knock out in about 15–20 minutes on a fresh character. The key was treating it like a two-stop supply run—Buried City Hospital for three items, Dam Battlegrounds for the herb—backed up by crafting and traders when RNG was uncooperative.

If you adopt the same mobility-focused loadout, pre-accept inventory check, and tight routing, you’ll feel that same shift. And once you’re comfortable doing that, Lance’s Mixtape and the rest of his questline stop being roadblocks and start becoming reliable sources of meds, blueprints, and reputation.

If I can turn these quests into quick errands after the amount of time I wasted on them, you absolutely can too—just stick to the route, keep your bag light, and always, always extract as soon as the checklist is done.