Cannons Guide

Cannons are your raft’s teeth. They fire on their own, they chase targets that have been spotted, and they are the difference between a raft that raids and a raft that gets raided. This guide covers everything confirmed about how cannons actually behave.

Cannons are fully automatic

You do not aim or fire cannons — place them and they engage on their own. Players have verified this repeatedly: park next to a target and the cannons open up without any input.

How targeting works

The mechanics, as confirmed by the dev team answering players in the official Discord:

• Cannons do not shoot through your walls.
• Once a cannon has seen a target, it keeps tracking that player — if they run to the far side of your base but stay inside the cannon’s firing angle, it keeps shooting.
• Placement that blocks the cannon’s view (your own walls, third decks) takes cannons out of the fight. One player watched their second-floor cannons refuse to fire until the layout opened up.

Practical rule: cannons need line of sight to the water where raiders approach. Front and side edges, unblocked, pointing at open sea.

The 4-cannon cap

You start with a placement cap of four cannons. The Raft Weapons upgrade in the Crafting Table’s upgrade tab raises the cap (it covers turrets too) and costs 150 wood + 110 metal + 70 scrap.

Metal is the bottleneck — cannons are expensive in metal specifically, which is why barrel runs and raiding matter. See the resources guide for the fastest metal routes.

Cannon damage: the wood-wall problem

Low-level cannons are surprisingly weak against structures. Combat logs from the game’s own Discord describe players “breaking my metal structures while I cannot crack their wood walls” — meaning raw, unupgraded cannons struggle to demolish even basic building pieces.

Two consequences:

1. Upgrade your cannons before planning sieges; upgraded cannon damage is what actually deletes rafts.
2. Boarding beats bombarding early on. Until your cannons are upgraded, a sword raid on foot does more structural damage than a broadside.

Cannons also have average accuracy — moving rafts eat a lot of misses. Don’t expect sniping; expect suppression.

Turrets are the sister defense piece: shorter detection range, and they lean anti-personnel while cannons lean anti-structure. The full comparison lives in the turrets guide — short version: cannons to break rafts, turrets to shred boarders.

Placement patterns that work

• The broadside: cannons in a row along one open flank. Turn that flank toward your target and delete it.
• The quad guard: one cannon per corner, each with clear water view — best all-around defense for solo players.
• The chaser: front-mounted cannons on a fast raft for raiding — engage while closing the distance.

Related pages

• Turrets guide — the anti-personnel complement
• Best defense guide — full layouts
• Lock Raft & shield — what happens when cannons aren’t enough