Rafting in Valheim

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You’ve mastered the land around you – you feel safe in your enclosure. You have boar, and piggies, and a healthy stock of cooked meat. You’ve maybe even got some fancy blue Troll armour. What’s next? How about a naval expedition?

The first vessel in Valheim is the basic raft. To build this you will need a workbench nearby, plus some raw materials:

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

You need to use the hammer to place a raft on a body of water within the vicinity of a workbench. Nice and simple. Not so simple is how to get it moving!

Once you jump aboard (and by the way, if you can’t reach without going in the water, there is a ladder on the back to climb up – press E) then you need to go to the multi-function tiller to control it. You can press W or S to increase or decrease speed. There are three forward speeds, each denoted by an extra arrow above the tiller – speed 1 is just skulling forward with the tiller, speed 2 has the sail unreefed half way, and speed 3 has the full sail. There is only one reverse speed, which is skulling the tiller.

You can also use A and D to move the tiller left and right. It won’t re-centre once you release; the effect is cumulative and you can see how far over you have it with the white bar above the tiller.

You also need to take the wind into account. Like any sailing vessels, you will struggle more sailing into the wind than with the wind. Rafts are particularly bad at this, and this one has a lot of leeward motion when sailing across the wind. You have a wind direction arrow on the minimap (so that’s what that is!), and you also have a relative wind direction indicator with a gray zone around 30 degrees either side of windward to help you get as close as you can when tacking.

The only thing left to do is to set off and explore further!

When you’ve mastered controlling the raft, take a look at our articles on the Karve and the Longship. These boats far surpass the raft in speed, control, and general usefullness. By the time you have reached the Longship you will be able to seat multiple players in your ship, carry a hold full of ores from extended expeditions, and sail vast distances incredibly quickly.