How to Unlock Harder Difficulties in Rainbow Six Extraction

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction is a pretty difficult game to beat, given how easy it is to get overwhelmed and killed by your enemies. This definitely isn’t the type of zombie game where you can just face waves of zombies, infected, or in this game’s case, the Archaeans, and come out alive. It’s much more tactical and heavily relies on map awareness, team synergy, and gathering intel. At some point when you become more seasoned, you’ll want to delve into harder territory. Here’s how to unlock harder difficulties in Rainbow Six Extraction.

How to unlock harder difficulties in Rainbow Six Extraction

The harder difficulties can be unlocked by increasing your React Milestone levels. You’ll start off with the Moderate and Cautious difficulties. At React Milestone level 7, you will unlock the Severe difficulty, then the Critical level at 11.
These are the settings at each difficulty or threat level as they’re called in-game:

Moderate

• Operators level 1-3
• Few low-level Archaeans
• No parasite mutations

Cautious

• Operators level 3+
• Low-level Archaeans
• Parasite Mutation Risk: 50%
• +50% objective XP

Severe

• Operators level 6+
• Full Archaean Ecosystem
• Parasite Mutation Risk: 75%
• +100% objective XP

Critical

• Operators level 8+
• Full Archaean Ecosystem
• Parasite Mutation Risk:100%
• +200% objective XP

There is a higher risk-reward factor the higher difficulty you play. It’s also recommended that you actually follow the Operator level threshold. It’s very easy to die in Rainbow Six Extraction, and with difficulties really ramping up in what enemies they throw at you, it could easily set your progression back.

Even if you can unlock the harder difficulties quite early, you should get acquainted with a handful of Operators so that if you find yourself having MIA Operators, you’ll have a reliable backup.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction is out now for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series S/X, and PC. A 2-hour trial is available for people who don’t own the full game.