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Build and Defend Your Raft — Beginner Guide (2026)
Beginner Updated 2026-09-03

Beginner Guide (2026)

Build and Defend Your Raft drops you onto a tiny wooden pallet in the middle of a green ocean with nothing but a Crafting Table, a captain’s chair and a chest. This guide walks you through the first hour: what the tutorial asks of you, what to build first, and how to avoid becoming someone’s first loot pinata.

The tutorial quests

The game onboards you with a short quest chain (the whole tutorial takes about a minute if you just follow it):

  1. Collect the materials — grab the floating crates and barrels around your raft. During the tutorial phase every pickup grants 5 wood regardless of what you actually grabbed.
  2. Upgrade the Crafting Table to Level 2 — feed your wood into the table’s upgrade menu. This unlocks floors, walls, doors, nets and cannons.
  3. Raid other players — the game explicitly tells you to go take other players’ chests. Raiding is not an optional side activity; it is the economy.

Your first 10 minutes

  • Do not decorate. Flags, torches and cosmetics do zero steal protection. Every plank should go into progression first.

  • Craft a net early. Nets hang off your raft’s edge and catch floating loot automatically while you sail — the single best passive income in the game. See the nets guide.

  • Buy the second floor when you can afford it. Walls and a door give you a place to retreat; see the building guide for the piece catalog and costs.

  • Learn the two panic buttons. Lock Raft stops attackers for a short window

    and Shield blocks cannon fire — both have cooldowns, so don’t waste them the moment you spawn (you also get a free one-minute shield when you join a server). Details in the lock & shield guide.

Video walkthrough — Giga Dash's run covers the whole first hour — harvesting, the table grind and the first upgrades — exactly the route this guide walks.

## What to upgrade first

The Crafting Table’s upgrade tab has four tracks: the table itself, your chest, raft size, and raft weapons. The community-proven order:

  1. Crafting Table level — every higher tier of gear is locked behind it.
  2. Nets — more passive loot while you do anything else.
  3. Raft Size — the first level costs 180 wood and raises your build limit.
  4. Walls and a door — a closed ring beats a pretty deck.
  5. Raft Weapons — 150 wood, 110 metal and 70 scrap raises your cannon and turret placement cap (you start at 4 cannons’ worth).

Common beginner mistakes

  • Swimming with sharks. The water is hostile: sharks chase and bite swimmers, and you can only hold your breath for a limited time. Use your harpoon to pull loot in instead of diving for it.
  • Leaving the chest on the dock. New players park their chest right by the edge. Move it inward — raiders grab the whole chest and walk off with it.
  • Fighting everything. An 18-player server means somebody out there has reinforced walls and four upgraded cannons. Read a raft before you attack it: cannons and plating mean come back later.
  • Ignoring gold. You’ll collect gold from floats and sharks and wonder what it’s for. Right now: nothing. It is saved for a future update — just bank it.

Where to go next