Raft‘s early game progression hinges heavily on your ability to gather sand and clay. Without these two resources, you’re unable to progress to smelting your own metals, crafting glass, or accessing the more advanced food and water recipes that allow you to spend less time focused on base subsistence.
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These resources are protected by the shark, a strong enemy that must either be distracted or defeated. Once you’ve bypassed this first obstacle, you have proper access to the water and can retrieve more resources than you can fish out of the surface. Here’s where to find clay and sand, along with how to gather them safely.
Where To Find Clay And Sand
Scanning the horizon will frequently show you the distant silhouettes of small islands. While you’ll occasionally drift close enough to reach them naturally, you’ll generally want a basic sail or a paddle and then you can direct yourself to them more reliably.
Examining the shallows around these islands will reveal some reefs. In shallow areas, they are easily visible from the surface. Deeper ones might have vines of seaweed poking above the waves.
A disposable anchor can be crafted, we have a full guide on this here. You can pick up a few early on by collecting floating barrels. A multiplayer lobby can leave a player on board to ensure it doesn’t drift away.
Swimming down into these reveals deposits of metal, rock, sand and clay. All of these resources can be dislodged with a hook, but your priority is sand and clay.
- Sand deposits are the same colour as the background sand but form slight bumps and are highlighted in the player’s vision as they get close.
- Clay deposits are a darker shade and stand out more easily at a distance.
On non-peaceful difficulties this exploration will be obstructed by a shark, the same one that followed your raft and has been chewing on the corners. You’ll need some way of dealing with it.
How To Get Past The Shark
There are a few different methods for evading the shark or killing it, depending on what you have available. At a minimum, you should have a wooden spear already: Stabbing the shark while it attacks your raft can dislodge it and save you precious materials.
When playing in hard mode, multiple sharks can spawn, making combat more difficult and favouring methods of evasion.
|
Method |
Requirements |
Description |
|---|---|---|
|
Sharkbait |
Some fish to craft the bait. |
The sharkbait item distracts the shark for about one minute. This is long enough for a couple of dives into the reef, but not enough time to collect all the sand and clay you’ll need. |
|
Shallows |
Quick reflexes. |
Small amounts of resources can be found in the shallows around the islands, allowing you to dive in quickly, grab one resource node, and climb back out. Larger islands can have inland pools the shark cannot reach. |
|
Evasion |
A decent sized island and a way of anchoring your ship. |
The shark will typically stay near your raft, so traveling to the other side of an island and diving there can prevent it from following you. |
|
Teamwork |
At least two people in a multiplayer lobby. |
In a multiplayer lobby, one player can focus on shark-fighting while the other dives for resources in relative safety. Typically, the host should do the fighting as they will have the best latency. |
|
Easy Difficulty |
Set difficulty to easy when creating the world. |
In easy difficulty you do not lose items upon death. You can feed yourself to the shark while gathering resources and respawn on the boat with your loot intact. |
|
Melee Combat |
Wooden Spear or better. |
The shark can be fought in the water with a spear. Find a clear expanse of water with no visible obstructions and watch the shark as it approaches. Swim backwards and to the side then stab its face as it opens its mouth to bite you: the shark will flinch away and retreat for a few seconds before charging again. |
|
Ranged Combat |
20 or more stones. |
The shark will break off its current attack if struck with any weapon. Throwing rocks underwater is difficult but requires less timing than using a spear. |
You can also combine several of these methods. Shark bait can distract the shark long enough for you to swim away from the raft and evade its detection.
If you successfully kill the shark, a new one will not spawn while the corpse is still present. You can partially loot the shark for four shark meat and then leave the remainder in the water. This roughly doubles the time before a new shark spawns.
How To Use Clay and Sand
You’ve fought hard to gather these two resources but it isn’t immediately clear how to use them, since the research book doesn’t have any important recipes using them. What you’ll instead want to do is craft wet bricks, using two of each resource. Place these on the deck of your boat and wait about one in-game day as they dry.
The dried bricks can then be researched to unlock the smelter recipe, giving you access to metal, copper, glass and vine goo. These smelter recipes are the foundation of the next stage of the game, so you’ll typically want at least two smelters in order to produce good quantities of them.
The six bricks used for the smelters and the one brick consumed by the research bench total to 14 of each resource at a minimum. You’ll typically want more to craft a second and third smelter. Later on you’ll need sand to smelt into glass.
Depending on how closely packed the resources are in the reef you’re exploring, you might be able to gather everything in a single diving session after defeating or escaping the shark. More likely, you’ll need to find a second island with the remaining resources.
How To Gather Sand And Clay Quickly
Once you’ve gathered the materials for a single smelter, it quickly becomes faster to collect the resources to scale up further: metal tools can dig much faster, while vine goo gives you access to the flippers and oxygen bottle to improve your diving speed and how long you can stay underwater.
It is also possible to gather some upgrades beforehand. Small amounts of metal can be found from salvaging wrecks, letting you craft a metal hook for faster digging.
The scrap hook requires one metal bolt, a frequent drop from loot boxes on islands and other rafts.
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