Thanks to discovering that the fortified planks essentially made my raft impervious to shark attack, I decided that it was at last time to expand my raft and create myself a floating farmstead. In order to do this, though, I needed to grind a lot of materials.
A lot of wood and plastic for the base, and then a lot of metal ingots and nails to fortify them. It was going to be a time consuming endeavour, but ultimately worth it. Especially since with a larger raft I'd be able to accommodate some livestock! There are llamas and chicken-type-things you can capture on the large islands, but if you don't have a suitable spot for them on your raft... well, they'll just go over the edge and become sharkfood.
I needed these creatures so I could learn a few more crafting recipes. It was time to gather resources.
Because my boat is fortified against shark attack, if I want to kill the shark and have 3 minutes of peaceful swimming-around-my-boat time, I literally have to jump into the water with my spear and prepare to strike it several times.
But once it's dead and I've gathered the delicious shark flesh, I can quickly explore the area around my raft. Normally I cheese it and only search for water items around the large islands, where the shark doesn't realise I'm swimming, but for this collection endeavour I wanted every possible source of metal explored, and that meant exploring the waters around the small islands too.
I now have a lotttttt of shark meat.
While searching for islands for metal ore finding, I was also following the radio signal that I found thanks to the first structure I found.
This radio signal led to a beached luxury cruiser!
I hurriedly started exploring it... this one was a bit more difficult to navigate than the first structure. There were locked doors and I had to work out how to get inside the ship. Apparently this ship suffered a rather grizzly fate due to a lacking food supply, mutated rats, and a crazed military man.
This ship was your classic puzzle — locked doors, need to explore rooms to find keys or materials to craft certain things like a jack or bomb, different coloured keys for different doors, etc.
I needed to craft a headlamp to be able to explore it properly as it was very dark, and I found a good amount of plastic onboard!! Always need more plastic!
Also onboard the ship were the mutated rats that notes kept alluding to.
They were terrible creatures that would leap out of the shadows and ravage you, and I did not like them, not one bit. They also respawned very rapidly so as you would back and forth throughout the ship to solve these puzzles, they would munch on you.
Once I finished exploring the ship, I found the next set of coordinates to put into my receiver and it was time to return to my initial task of expanding my raft!
One thing that bothers me with the receiver, is that the blue radio blips don't go away. So now I have three blue blips on my screen, and I don't know which one is the new one. After googling, I have discovered that the blue blip with a slight square around it is the one that the number you've inputted is telling you to go to. Honestly; how it appears isn't exactly intuitive. Though it is now, after I've read it, of course.
My new destination is over 3km away so I should have plenty of scavenging and crafting to complete on my way.
I decided not to go toooooo large with my expansion. After all, it's meant to just be a raft and if it gets too big I won't really be able to park it anywhere. I struggle enough as is trying to maneuver it into a good position at an island so I don't have to do too much swimming.
It's mostly irritating trying to get back onboard if I don't park it properly. The fencing around the raft doesn't help and I have to jump onto one of my nets to then jump over the fence. My own fault, haha, but still.
There's enough room in my expansion for 2 llamas and 2 cluckers... I think. I still need to catch them.
Turns out I need explosive powder to craft the nets I shoot to capture the animals, and I've only managed to get that powder once. You get explosive goo from the pufferfish, then you smelt it into the explosive powder. But those pufferfish often explode before I'm able to kill them. I'll need to investigate a way to kill them properly so I can get their goo.
Also, in order to hide the UI of the game to take screenshots, you press the . button. I learnt today that if your fat finger hits the comma instead of period, you get 3rd person view!!
I personally don't really like the 3rd person view, but thought it was nifty.
Sadly you can't really zoom out a lot with it in order to take nice screenshots.
Until next time! :)
All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, 
Posted from Kaelci Games with Exxp : https://kaelci.games/2022/07/25/raft-expanding-my-chunk-of-wood-at-last/