Rainbow Six Extraction Spillover Crisis event explained

Time to prepare.

The limited-time Rainbow Six Extraction Spillover Crisis event is the first of its kind, and we’ve got all the information you need to get started when it comes.

The three-week event kicks off today, 19 February, and will take over Extraction during this time, replacing Weekly Assignments. It requires three players to engage; while Operator selection isn’t limited in any way — but you’d likely fare better with higher-levelled characters.

General gameplay

While Extraction is usually about an offensive attack, Spillover is described by Ubisoft as “the ultimate defense experience”. Your team of Operators will need to choose a location and plant a dissolution agent canister on a sprawl colony to kick things off, attempting to muster your defenses as waves of Archaeans crash against you.

To be completely successful, you’ll need to decontaminate each of the nine clusters that are present on your submap; unlike Extraction normal, you’re restricted to the one submap rather than three, but you can still extract early to keep whatever progress you can gather. Rewards are effectively split up into key sections: 2, 5 and 9 total decontaminations.

Your team will have twenty-five total minutes to get it done, with each of the nine decontamination sequences taking 90 seconds each (assaults start roughly 15 seconds into the process). Each decontamination will pit at least three Archaean assults against your team, and the dissolution agent canister itself has 500 hit points before it gives up the mechanical ghost.

If you really want to make things interesting, your team can essentially trigger three decontaminations at once, as each Operator is able to carry a canister and deploy it at a colony. Alternatively, unused canisters can be dropped near an active one, essentially serving as bait.

Difficulty, enemy traits and scaling

The real trick with the event is that each of the sprawl colonies have a specific trait attached to them, as follows:

Three (3) colonies are cloaked, making any Archaeans assaulting you invisible
Three (3) colonies are spored, meaning any Archaeans attacking you will carry spores
Three (3) colonies are elite, with Elite Archaeans added to assaulting forces

Icons will make it clear which trait is attached to which colony. Moreover, difficulty will increase with each colony decontaminated… so there might be some strategy in eliminating the Elite ones first.

As part of this ever-increasing difficulty, you’re guaranteed the following enemy types as you progress:

Colony 1: Grunts
Colony 2: More Grunts, or Grunts & Spikers, or Grunts & Breachers
Colony 3: More Grunts, or Grunts & Spikers, or Grunts & Breachers
Colony 4: More Grunts & Rooters
Colony 5: More Grunts & Rooters, or Grunts & Spikers & Rooters, or Grunts & Breachers & Rooters
Colony 6: More Grunts & Rooters, or Grunts & Spikers & Rooters, or Grunts & Breachers & Rooters
Colony 7: More Grunts & Tormentor, or Grunts & Smasher
Colony 8: More Grunts & Tormentor, or Grunts & Smasher
Colony 9: More Grunts & Apex

Got all that?

Rewards

As with any good limited-time events, limited-time rewards are on offer. Here’s what you’ll be able to earn:

5 Crisis classic studies: Offering up a new Headgear, Uniform, Charm and Weapon Skin set
1 Study (playable in any Extraction mode): A REACT auto-turret
1 Meta Study: Offering more story

More Charms, lore and XP are also on offer.

That auto-turret is perhaps the main prize of Spillover; to earn it, you’ll need to defeat 500 total Archaeans during the time the event is active. Your Archaean kills in Spillover or regular Extraction modes all count.

Rainbow Six Extraction is currently available on Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, PS4 and PS5; it’s also available via Xbox Game Pass. We reviewed the base game here.