Raft

You begin Raft on a small wooden platform, adrift in the middle of a very wide ocean, and from that point on almost every decision you make is about one object. The raft feeds you, holds still for you, powers your machines, carries your loot and eventually sails somewhere on purpose, and each of those jobs is a different piece of upkeep. That makes the useful way through our coverage a question of function rather than of geography: work out which job is failing you right now, then read the page that fixes it.

Stay alive first, then improve the raft

Three bars on the left of the screen decide whether you get to play the rest of the game, and our survival tips page treats hunger, thirst and health as one job, with your oxygen level to watch as well the first time you go looking for something underwater. The page calls the Builders Hammer one of the most important tools you can make: it lives in the tools tab of your inventory and it repairs the raft as well as building on it, so a raft that is being chewed on is a hammer problem before it is a weapon problem.

Food and water both take a small installation rather than a lucky find. A planter turns the beans and potatoes that arrive in barrels into a crop you water and guard from seagulls, a fishing rod plus a grill and any burnable plank turns the ocean into meals, and a purification station boils the seawater that is otherwise too salty to drink. Collecting the raw material for all of that is easier with a net than with the hook, since the net sweeps up whatever floats past while you get on with something else, and the page is blunt about the danger of swimming out too far after debris while a shark circles and your raft drifts off without you.

The last three tips are about what you do with whatever you have managed to find. A research station converts the blueprints that turn up in barrels into things you can actually build, other players' rafts can be rammed and stripped for supplies or approached peacefully instead, and the small islands are worth a stop for coconut seeds, plants and shallow water that is easy to search.

Three navigation items, and only one of them stops you

Our anchor page frames steering as a set of three parts working together. Sails give you speed and let you point at an island you have spotted, the Streamer acts as a compass so you know where you are and which way you are heading, and the anchor is the only one that brings the whole thing to a halt. That last job is the one with consequences, because leaving the raft unanchored while you explore can mean losing it to the tide and starting again.

The choice between the two anchors is a choice between cheap and permanent. The throwable one is available early, goes on any foundation block and is gone the moment you pull it back out, so it covers a single stop and nothing after that. The stationary one costs more and arrives later, needs a three by three platform with the middle square removed so it can reach the water, and then serves for the rest of the run, which is why a single one is enough for any raft. Neither can be mounted upstairs, whatever you do with the floor below. The survival tips page and the anchor page agree on the habit that matters: drop something before you swim for shore.

Power is a second economy with its own fuel

Once you start bolting electrics onto the deck, batteries become a consumable, and our battery charger page exists because dead batteries are otherwise dead resources. The charger itself is only unlocked by fetching three parts on Caravan Island, which our pages call the fourth story island, and it runs on Biofuel, which means connecting it to a Biofuel Tank through Fuel Pipes. Two slots means two batteries at a time, one canister of fuel covers up to four charges, and a battery takes roughly 185 seconds to fill, with an orange light while it works and a green one when the unit shuts itself off.

That page is also our best short note on where raw material lives, since it sends you to the ocean surface and loot boxes for plastic, to Vasagatan for scrap, and to safes found with a metal detector for titanium. The rest of the electrical hardware, from the wind turbine to the grill, smelter, purifier and powered zipline, is scattered across the story stops and gathered in our item locations guide.

Six weapon types, four of them on a damage ladder and one that catches rather than kills

Our weapon crafting page counts six weapon types, and its four melee entries form a straight climb in damage: the wooden spear at 5, the metal spear at 10, the machete at 15 and the titanium sword at 20, with durability running 20, 40, 40 and 85. The bow is the only ranged option and has no damage figure of its own, because the arrow decides, and the three arrow tiers repeat the same ladder at 10, 15 and 20. If you want one number that tells you what tier you are on, the page offers this: five titanium arrows put down a Screecher.

The sixth entry is the odd one. The net launcher is a capture tool rather than a weapon, short ranged enough that you have to read an animal's patrol route and fire while it walks a straight line, and it is what turns wildlife into either food or livestock. The page still expects the wooden spear to be the first weapon you own, though, and it is also the answer to the shark circling your raft: wait for it to come to you, land the three or four hits our survival tips page describes, and use bait when you would rather move it somewhere else.

Carrying capacity is the upgrade you feel most

Wool is the one material our pages say you cannot pick up anywhere in the world, and the reason it matters is that backpacks and armour both depend on it. Getting it is a small livestock project: net a llama on one of the Big Islands, bring it home, build it a fenced grass plot and keep the grass watered, and only then can a pair of Shears made from a hinge, some scrap and a metal ingot take a coat off it. The net launcher from the weapon list is the first half of that job, which is the clearest case in the game of one of our pages only working with another open beside it.

Storage is the other half of the same problem, and neither half of it is something you can simply put together on day one: the large storage unit and the big backpack are both blueprints you have to find and research before the recipe exists for you at all, which our blueprint page catalogues along with the rest of them.

From drifting to sailing, and then to the end of the story

Blueprints are what take the raft past the shape you built by hand, and our blueprint list is the page that catalogues them: thirty entries, framed there as things that either open a new area or get you past an obstacle, added to your Research Table as collectibles and turned into recipes you can hang on any flat wall once researched. Two of those entries are the Engine and the Steering Wheel, sitting together in Vasagatan's cockpit, right down at the ship's far end, which our list says opens only once you have planted a bomb, and the Radio Tower pays out the Head Light for having got that ship ready in the first place. Our items guide sets all of them out stop by stop, which is the fastest way to check whether the island in front of you still owes you something.

Near the end, the errands get specific. Temperance, which our Selene Key page calls the seventh story island, is an icy stop with an observatory, the Igloo Village and then a research facility full of puzzles and poisonous rooms, and the facility stays shut until you have found both a Blowtorch and the Selene Key. Our Selene Key page walks the safe code that produces the key and the village chore that produces the torch, then purifies the reactor room, which is where the Electric Smelter blueprint and the Utopia Code are waiting. What we do not have is a walkthrough for each island in turn, so treat these pages as the checklist of things worth carrying off every stop rather than as a route through the story.