System is the part of ARC that runs your whole business, not one room. It holds the bridges to your hardware, the gear that lives outside any single game — lobby lights, the open/closed sign, waiting-area music — the schedules that open and close your day, and the media files every game can share. Anything that belongs to your location as a whole lives here.
You reach it from the System item in ARC’s main navigation. On its own screen ARC calls this area Settings, with the subtitle “Configure hardware, settings, and appearance.”
System vs. the Game Editor
ARC has two places to set things up, and they serve different purposes. Knowing which is which saves a lot of hunting.
- System (this area) is business-wide. It is for things that aren’t tied to one room: the protocol bridges to your hardware, location-wide devices, open/close schedules, lobby effects, and the shared media library. System settings are always available, no matter which rooms are running.
- The Game Editor is per game. Open a game in the Editor and you configure everything that makes that one escape room work — its objectives, hints, displays, in-room props, panels, per-game automations and scenes, variables, and its own media.
Some features — Devices, Logic (automations and scenes), and Media — exist in both places. That is on purpose. A device in System is your lobby sign; a device in a game is the maglock on its final door. They look similar but belong to different scopes, so each has its own page in these guides.
A quick test
Ask: “Does this belong to one specific room?” If yes, it lives in that game’s Editor. If it belongs to your building as a whole — the lobby, the schedule, shared files, your team — it lives here in System.
What’s in System
System has seven sections, in this order.
| Section | What it’s for |
|---|---|
| Overview | The health and housekeeping page — how your system is doing, your software version and updates, your license, ARC’s built-in services, and general preferences such as language, theme, and startup page. See The Overview page. |
| Connections | The protocol bridges between ARC and your hardware — MQTT, Z-Wave, DMX, Hue, a Raspberry Pi, and more. You add a connection once, and every device that uses it rides on top. See Connections. |
| Devices | Your location-wide gear — lobby lighting, signs, music, schedule-driven hardware. See System devices. |
| Integrations | The outside services you connect ARC to — Weather, UniFi Protect, Tailscale for remote access, ElevenLabs voices, and the Slack and Discord chat bridges. Each one is a card you open and set up. See Integrations. |
| Logic | Business-wide rules and sequences — open/close schedules, lobby lighting and music, signage, reactions to location-wide devices. Automations and Scenes are tabs inside this section. See System automations and scenes. |
| Media | The shared media library — files available to every game. See Shared media. |
| Vision | Your cameras: adding them, checking they’re online, and building saved camera views. Vision is an optional add-on, so this section only appears once it’s installed and turned on. See Vision and cameras. |
The Raspberry Pi and the Windows Bridge are connection types rather than sections of their own, but they have enough setup to warrant their own guide — see Raspberry Pi and Windows Bridge.
Overview is where a lot of the once-scattered setup now lives. Rather than each feature getting its own page, most open as a panel from the Overview list: Staff & permissions, Control Station, Chat, Text-to-speech, Vision service, Assist, Smart Text, Speech Recognition, and Moments. System logs opens from the same page — it’s where ARC records what its background services have been doing, and where you can send a private report to support. ARC keeps the last 7 daily log files by default; you can change that in the logs panel.
Connections come first
Most hardware in ARC starts with a connection. Before you can add a device — in System or in a game — ARC needs the protocol bridge that reaches it. If you’re setting up hardware for the first time, start at Connections.
Everything runs locally
ARC is local-first. Your connections, devices, automations, and media all live on the ARC host machine at your location — not in the cloud. A signal from a prop travels across your own local network to the host and back, with no remote round-trip in the middle. That keeps your rooms running even if the internet drops, and it makes the ARC host real operational infrastructure: keep it stable and on a dependable local network, and your whole setup stays dependable too.
Where to go next
- The Overview page — health, updates, your license, add-ons, and general preferences.
- Connections — the protocol bridges, with a table of every connection type.
- Raspberry Pi and Windows Bridge — the multi-role Pi bridge and the Windows display kiosk.
- System devices — your location-wide hardware.
- Integrations — the outside services you connect ARC to.
- System automations and scenes — business-wide rules and on-demand sequences.
- Shared media — files every game can use.
- Vision and cameras — the camera add-on, saved views, and Moments.