Valheim Raft Guide: How To Build, For What To Use, Controls, More

Valheim is a game about Vikings, and amongst other things, Vikings are known as legendary sailors who were both exploring and conquering half of the world with their mighty longships.

Naturally, sailing is an important part of Valheim as well, and you will be able to sail the high seas.

There will be a lot of lakes and oceans in your world (Picture: Iron Gate)

But, you won't immediately start with a Viking longship. Your first mean of transport across lakes and oceans will be the Valheim Raft.

The Valheim Raft will be crucial for your progress in the early stages of the game, especially since the world is procedurally generated, and you might end up in a situation where you will need to cross some big body of water to get to the first boss or to visit the next biome.

How to build Raft in Valheim

Raft allows you to traverse vast waters early in the game (Picture: Iron Gate)

Building a raft is one of the first few things you will do during the first few hours into the game, and it should be a relatively easy task to do.

We recommend that you build a raft as soon as possible because you will definitely need it.

In order to build a raft in Valheim, you will first need to discover some water surface, but each Valheim world usually has a lot of water in it, so that should not be too hard to find.

To build a raft, you will need the following materials:

• 20 Wood
• 6 Leather Scraps (dropped by Boars and Deers)
• 6 Resin (dropped by Greylings)

You will also need to craft a hammer, which is one of the basic tools.

Once you have all this ready, do as follows:

• Build a Workbench near some body of water (lake, ocean)
• Stand close to that Workbench and the water.
• Select your hammer
• Select a raft from options to build it.

And that's it! Now you have your raft, which should appear in the water near where you stand.

But now we are jumping on a more difficult part, and that is how to actually use it.

How to use and control your Raft in Valheim

The yellow rudder symbol shows you the raft's direction(Picture: Iron Gate)

To control the Valheim Raft, you will use your basic WASD controls.

Use W to move the Raft forward, and use S to go backward. And to turn the rudder left or right, you will use A and D.

Near your Raft, you will see a small sign representing rudder, which uses arrows to represent if you are going slow, medium or fast forward, as well as the direction if you are turning left or right, or going backwards.

• Read more: Valheim: How to craft Stagbreaker, the best early game weapon

That sounds easy enough, but the tricky part comes with the wind. As in real life, your Raft is mostly powered by the wind and the direction of the wind will have a huge influence on your controls.

Unfortunately, you simply won't be able to do much against the wind if you are not going in the wind's direction, and oftentimes your raft will either go very slowly or simply stop if you are facing the wind.

Later in the game, you will get access to longboats (Picture: Iron Gate)

The best thing you can do is to wait for favourable winds or simply to go very slowly and hope that the wind's direction will turn at some point.

If you ever get stuck with your raft in some shallow waters around rocks and mud, you will need to get out and push the raft until it gets out from there. You will do the same thing if your raft somehow ends up on the land, you will need to push it back to the water.

• Read more: Valheim Farming guide: Seeds, cultivation, farms, more

Manoeuvring the raft in Valheim sometimes can be quite frustrating, especially because of the wind and somehow wonky controls, but you will need patience and some practice to get better with it, at least until you get better boats, including the legendary Viking longboats.