Yes. You can play every Isolated raid alone and never see another player. You can queue Open raids alone and choose whether the game matches you against squads or other solos. Both work today.
What nobody tells you is that "solo" means two different things on the Missions Terminal, and one of them has no matchmaking at all. Get that wrong and you spawn into Shegolskoe with two strangers you never asked for, or into Downtown with a trio that did. Here is what each setting actually does, what a death costs when nobody can carry your kit out, and which raids to learn alone first. Everything below was checked in the game on builds 0.4.0.148 and 0.4.0.156 (25 and 27 September 2026).
The FAQ also admits that solo is the harder way to play. It is. The rest of this guide is how much harder, and what to do about it.
Hover the Isolated tab and the game's own description is the whole rule:
Look at what's missing from that panel: no Matchmaking mode, no Auto-fill squad. Isolated raids don't matchmake. Your squad is whoever you invite into the two empty seats, or nobody.
That cuts both ways. Nobody third-parties you while you loot a building. Nobody covers the stairwell while you do it.
Select Open Raid and two controls appear between the squad seats and the deploy button. They are the whole of solo play in PvPvE.
It sits at the top of the raid list, and it exists for you. From the developer Q&A: "The update added the ability to search for multiple raids when playing solo." Queue several raids at once and take whichever fills first, instead of watching one raid's countdown.
Asked whether groups get it too, Gaijin said: "After reviewing the results from the solo version, we will indeed then expand this feature's capabilities for faster raid searches." For now it's a solo feature, and on Open raids it's the difference between playing and waiting.
The game doesn't scale down for one person. What changes is who pays for mistakes.
Extraction rates from the Missions Terminal on the morning of 25 September, Isolated mode. They move through the day, so read them as a ranking.
The Monolith's Beta level wants one extraction each from Shegolskoe, Factory and Airport. All three have an Isolated mode, so nothing in the early ladder needs a squad.
You don't need the Deluxe arsenal to solo. You need a kit you can afford to lose and a plan for the exit.
Isolated raids support squads across PC and console with no opt-in. For Open raids, consoles choose where to search: your own platform, consoles only, or any platform. Smallest pool or shortest queue, your call.
Active Matter is built for three, and every solo player hits the week where the problem isn't the game, it's the two empty seats. Isolated won't fill them. Open fills them with whoever's in the queue.
