Raft is a survival and sandbox video game developed by Redbeet Interactive and published by Axolot Games. Set on Earth in an endless ocean caused by climate change, players are placed on a small raft circled by sharks, and they must manage their hunger and thirst to survive. Using a hook, players can reel in debris floating in the ocean and use these materials to expand their raft into an expansive base, forge tools, make amenities to aid in survival, and create navigational equipment. By crafting a radio receiver, players can explore a series of story islands with a narrative about freeing survivors from imprisonment by a corrupt military general.
Raft started development as a student project at the Gotland campus of Uppsala University in Sweden. After they completed their course and released Raft prototype to the indie game platform Itch.io in December 2016, the game received attention from YouTubers, which allowed the team to focus on its development as their full-time jobs. As Redbeet Interactive expanded their staff from three to seven, Raft launched in early access to the storefront Steam on 23 May 2018, and received continuous updates, before the full game was released on 20 June 2022. Ports for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S were released on 4 December 2024.
The game received praise from several critics for its game design, sense of progression, multiplayer mode, and story islands, although a few reviewers thought its early game was slow. Commercially, Raft full release was the best-selling title on Steam for two consecutive weeks, and the game also saw a favorable launch on the Xbox Series X/S, as one of the best-selling indie games on the console. By 2024, Raft had sold at least five million copies.
Gameplay
Premise and survival
Raft is a survival and sandbox video game that can be played in single-player and co-op. Multiplayer, which can be played with up to ten people, supports cross-platform play and in-game voice chat. Raft is played in first-person by default, but a third-person perspective can be toggled via hot key. In the game, players are stranded on a raft in an endless ocean with a hook to reel in items from the waters. These resources, which include planks, palm leaves, and plastic, can be used to expand the initially four-panel raft, craft tools, and make amenities such as storage chests. Further crafting recipes are unlocked by placing materials and blueprints into a research table. Some resources can be refined using other appliances, such as ores into ingots using a smelter. New materials encountered throughout the game's progression unlock gradually stronger tools.
While gathering resources, players must also sustain themselves by gathering food through farming, fishing, or hunting, and hydrate themselves using water purifiers. Using a cooking pot or juicer, players can combine different ingredients to cook recipes for foods and drinks, which may also give additional status effects. If either the hunger or thirst meter reach zero, the player's health will start to deplete. The depletion of all health causes the player's death; afterwards, they can either be revived by a co-op teammate or respawn and lose part of their inventory. The raft is constantly circled by sharks, which will attack players if they enter the water. Sharks can also attack and destroy pieces of the raft, but they can be fought off using spears or bows. Another hazard is seagulls, which will ravage crop plots but can be distracted by scarecrows.
The raft serves both as players' mode of transport and base of operations; since building is impossible on land, all amenities must be placed on the boat. In addition to expanding its surface area with a building hammer, players can make structural components such as walls, support beams, staircases, and roofs, to eventually expand the raft into an elaborate base. Ziplines can be installed to aid in traversing onboard the raft, and collection nets can be crafted to automatically collect items from the ocean stream. It is also possible to unlock and craft various decorational items, such as furniture and paintings, and use a paint brush to modify the color and pattern of objects. In the game's creative mode, players are given unlimited health and resources to experiment with building. Other difficulty modes — peaceful, easy, and hard — change the amount of damage taken from enemies and the speed at which hunger and thirst are depleted.
Environment and objectives
Raft is an open world game. Breaking up the endless ocean in the world generation are occasional island, which feature materials such as trees, flowers for paint, and wild fruit, and metals and clays in the surrounding shallow reefs. Islands spawn in both small and large variants. The large islands feature trading posts, where players can exchange trash cubes — acquired by salvaging spare resources in a recycling machine — for various items such as fish bait. Players can also capture lifestock — cluckers, goats, llamas, and bees — which can be brought to the raft to farm produce. Outside lifestock, islands are populated by hostile animals, such as screecher birds and warthogs, and pufferfish in the shallows. The raft is always pushed by a directional wind, but players can craft anchors, engines, boat controls, sails, and paddles to steer their trajectory.
By crafting a radio receiver with batteries and antennas, players can see a radar screen, which displays nearby landmasses as dots on a map. By inputting four-digit codes into the receiver, players are guided to one of the game's story islands—islands which incorporate puzzle-solving elements as players search for the code to the next destination. Story islands, which serve as the primary objective breaking up endless drifting in the ocean, are often significantly larger than the regular islands and can take multiple in-game days to explore. They also feature discoverable notes and voice logs, which expand on the backstory to the game's apocalypse, and non-player characters who are unlocked as skins when talked to. Receiver codes and notes are stored in the player character's notebook. Exploring all story islands unlocks the last tier of tools and leads to the game's ending, but players are still able to continue exploring and expanding their raft thereafter.
Modding
Raft can be modded, which is facilitated by an external mod loader and the downloading website RaftModding. In a listicle for PC Gamer, Sarah James noted mods with quality-of-life additions and ones that remove base game features. Additions in her listed mods included a minimap, faster swimming, the removal of the hunger system, increases to the amount of debris in the ocean stream, and sprite helpers which players can assign to different tasks on the raft, such as farming crops. RaftVR, a mod that adds virtual reality support and allows players to physically throw their hook, paddle the raft, and fight enemies, was described as "[bringing] the game's open waters to life in a spectacular way" by Eurogamer Ian Higton.
Plot
After the Earth's ice caps melt as a result of global warming, a worldwide flood leads to the deaths of many and the submerging of almost all land. An initiative, the Floating Cities Project, is launched to construct livable environments floating on the oceans, but it is led by an egotistical former military general, Olof Wilkstrom. The player character is a Forward Scout—a person tasked with searching for a rumored utopia upon which civilization lives.
After constructing the radio receiver, the Forward Scout traverses to several locations, following a trace of trouble left by Olof. On the luxury ship Vasagatan, Olof abandoned his crew using the only lifeboat upon a crash. This led Olof to Caravan Town, an Indonesian settlement, where a salmonella pandemic soon broke out, believed by local scientists to have been intentionally caused by Olof. The residents of Caravan Town fled to the floating city Tangaroa, where conflict ensued between the refugees and the local governor. Coupled with an insect infestation and reactor failure, the people of Tangaroa and the refugees from Caravan Town were forced to evacuate. By the time the Forward Scout arrives at these locations, these events have already transpired and the settlements are abandoned.
After other stops, the Forward Scout arrives at the floating city Utopia, where they come face-to-face with Olof, who has enacted martial law over the city and imprisoned the refugees from Caravan Town and Tangaroa. After Olof and his army of hyenas are defeated by the Forward Scout, the general is imprisoned and the civilians are freed. In the ending cutscene, the survivors vow to rebuild human civilization.
Development and release
Itch.io prototype (2016–2017)
Developed in Unity, Raft started as a student project at the Gotland campus of Uppsala University in Sweden, by an indie team comprising programmer Semih Parlayan and artists Ellen Mellåker and André Bengtsson. As part of a course on researching and delivering a product to a video game market, they created the first prototype of Raft in approximately four months. In this first version, players could only use the hook to collect planks. To add intensity, the team introduced the hunger and thirst systems, but realized that players could jump into the waters to collect items directly instead of using the hook. To combat this oversight, they introduced the shark as a constant threat. According to Bengtsson, the shark solved multiple other gameplay issues as well, such as presenting a physical threat to the raft. When they later added islands, they found the shark also helped improve engagement when scavaging reefs.
After the completion of their university course, the team released Raft for free in its prototype state to the indie platform Itch.io in December 2016, under the alias "Raft Developer", with support for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. Bengtsson told PC Gamer that the game first received attention from a Russian YouTuber with around 300,000 subscribers and gained popularity in that country, before it "started snowballing". Raft was subsequently played by English-speaking YouTubers such as the Family Gaming Team and Markiplier. The latter, who has a fear of the ocean, played the game as part of a series called F*ck the Ocean and attracted over three million viewers. According to the developers' blog, the game received 100,000 download within a week; after half a year, it had been downloaded over five million times.
Early access (2018–2022)
Upon the response to the prototype, Redbeet Interactive — the game studio subsequently formed by the developers — began to work on Raft as their full-time jobs. They relocated headquarters to Skövde, a central city in the Swedish video game industry, and sold a 20% share in their studio to Axolot Games, a Stockholm-based developer who would acquire the publishing rights for Raft. As development towards a full release continued, Redbeet hired new staff including artists and programmers. By the game's completion, they were employing seven people. Bengtsson served as CEO and was in charge of most paperwork, which he described as "not great fun". Jannik Schmidt, a composer from Germany, was brought in to write the soundtrack in 2018. He would continue to contribute new pieces as the game was updated.
Raft launched in early access to the storefront Steam on 23 May 2018, exclusively for Windows, with an added multiplayer mode. Redbeet gradually released updates to the game. At first, these consisted primarily of small-scale additions and bug fixes, but they later transitioned their focus over to major updates. They began to expand on the game's story islands and lore with an update entitled "The First Chapter" on 3 December 2019, followed by "The Second Chapter" on 9 October 2020. "The Renovation Update" on 21 June 2021 added more options for decorating.
Full release (2022–)