Sailing Takes Me Away to . . . where are we going?

Dylan and I recently embarked on a tour of the seas, floating on a raft, surrounded by hungry sharks . . . which means . . . SHARK HATS!

Shark hats were a toothsome surprise

RAFT launched into the seas of survival games back in 2022. In 2022, my survival game repertoire was mostly Icarus, V Rising, and Planet Crafter. I remember seeing it come up in my recommended games but ignored it at the time. With the recent survival game sale on Steam, Raft was one of the games that Dylan (or should I say Barbra per the picture above) and I picked up to play together. 

The wikipedia article tells more about it's unusual path to launch, which included some influencer attention to their original project back in 2016. Kind of cool! Good on 'em for sticking to it and believing in a project.

This game has a pretty challenging starting point. I think we died several times just from starvation and not knowing exactly what it was we were doing. You start out on a small 3x3 platform, just collecting wood and plastic out of the ocean with a hook. Meanwhile, your water and food meters just keep going down. The best you could hope for was a random island full of watermelon. Eventually, you make a water distiller to cook seawater into fresh water. Next is a fishing pole. Next is a grill. Once you get the basics, you'll be fine, but that break-in felt tough! 

Watermelons ahead!

For a while, when we were about to die, we'd throw all our stuff out to each other in desperation. Die and come back, then the other person would do the same. Basically, when you die, you lose most of your stuff, which is a huge setback. So the next thing you need is storage, and BAM . . . they've got you on the crafting treadmill.

Our first two-tier raft design

You'll occasionally find a good crate of goods that helps you unlock a new thing you can craft, but the research table is clutch to discovering new recipes. You slot raw materials into your research table, sacrifice the item, and that action then unlocks new recipes. 

The main thing we got stuck on was not knowing that the main use of shark bait was to distract the shark while you went diving into the water for clay, sand, scrap, and whatever else is on the bottom of the ocean floor. We were just happily island-hopping and stuck wondering where we would find clay. Yes, Dylan turned to the ultimate source of information (a child of his who had played the game before), and he let us know you park your boat out about 50 meters from an island, throw down some shark bait, and then swim to the island completely unbothered by the shark. In fact you can stay down on the bottom around the island and dig up all the clay you need.

So far it's been a fun distraction . . . give us a bit and we'll have our ship looking amazing. For now it's more functional than fun, but eventually I imagine our vessel will look amazing. Until then, we'll continue badly singing Sailing by Christopher Cross while floating our way to (hopefully) Margaritaville on a couple planks and a prayer.

Happy Dueling!