ARK Survival Ascended Raft Base Building: How To Build Bases On Rafts

After mastering the use of the basic raft in ARK Survival Ascended, you might be interested in elevating your gameplay by attempting some base building on your raft, essentially creating a "mobile base." While this concept is appealing, it can be challenging due to the difficulty of constructing structures on the raft.

Fortunately, there are various methods you can employ to simplify the process and establish a solid raft base quickly. This guide will walk you through the fundamentals of building bases on your rafts in ARK Survival Ascended, enabling you to progress and construct the floating base you envision.

How To Build Foundations and Bases On Your Rafts

When it comes to building on your rafts, the first thing you'll notice is that you can easily place down foundations on the raft, but doing so will effectively render the raft non-functional, meaning you can't ride it anywhere. Thankfully, there is a method around this that will give you both the foundations needed to start building your base on the raft, but also the ability to still ride it, so let's dive in.

To begin with, we need to set up some scaffolding that lines up with the exact center of the raft, and by the exact center, we mean exact. So first off, mount the round and unmount it, and don't move your mouse at all, and use the arrow keys to look up and down. When looking down at the center of the raft, look for the darker chipped section of the center raft plank as shown in the image above.

Now, using a wood pillar, align the bottom of the pillar with the bottom of the darker chipped section and then move the pillar to the right, to set it in the middle of the center plank of the raft. Once you have this positioning, don't place the pillar, and instead place it down a wooden signpost (we'll need this for measuring in the next step).

With your signpost down, switch back to your pillar and move forward until the pillar is pushed as far into the sign as possible (still not having touched your mouse at this point to ensure you're accurate). Now, you can place the pillar, but before setting it, move it down until the middle shorter section of the pillar aligns with the bottom of the top plank of the sign as shown in the image above.

Once placed, you can move around freely and remove the sign, leaving the pillar in place, as you're now going to pop a wood ceiling on the top of the pillar. Once placed, you can then go ahead and place a quarter wall along the side of the ceiling where it's 90 degrees from the bottom of the raft.

With this step, you're good to start placing your foundations, so simply place them along the bottom of the quarter wall (making sure to place it in the center first so you can have a 3x3 raft instead of starting at the edge of the raft which would result in a 2x2 rand that looks uneven). And if you've done everything correctly, you should now have a foundation to begin building your base on, which is also still rideable as a raft.

We suggest using walls and structures with openings since you'll need to see where you're going and possibly even transparent structures like a greenhouse, but ultimately the choice is yours on how you want your raft base to look and feel. Either way, you now have the tools and tips necessary to build your base on a raft in ARK Survival Ascended.

We want to give full credit for this strategy to YouTuber Toastbloke for their in-depth breakdown of how to construct a proper raft foundation and build a raft base in ARK Survival Ascended. For more details on this guide, be sure to check out their full video on the topic below.