The shark is one of the most annoying features in the early days of Raft. It swims around your raft, preventing you from exploring the ocean, and occasionally destroys your foundations, forcing you to spend lots of materials repairing or even rebuilding your whole raft.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to completely stop shark attacks in Raft, as well as explain how the game mechanic works so you know how to deal with it in different situations.
Recommended Read: How to make Bolts in Raft
The only way to permanently stop shark attacks in Raft is by fortifying your outer foundations with Foundation Armor. To put Foundation Armor on a normal foundation, equip a Building Hammer, hold the right mouse button, and select Foundation Armor at the end of the Foundation and Floors building tab.
There are also two other ways to temporarily stop shark attacks in Raft – by either using Shark Bait or leaving your raft. You can find more information on all of these methods below.
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How to Stop Shark Attacks in Raft
The shark (named Bruce) always follows your raft, and it will attack a random outer foundation every 5 minutes (2 minutes in Hard mode).
Once the shark bites a foundation, it constantly deals damage to it until the foundation is broken unless you deal at least 15 damage to it, which will cause it to go away for a while.
Losing one foundation (or solid foundation) is not much of an issue since they only cost some Planks and Plastics.
However, all structures built on the destroyed foundation will also be destroyed, which can result in large material loss, depending on what is built on that foundation.
Below are the three ways to stop shark attacks in Raft.
1. Fortify Foundations
To permanently prevent shark attacks, craft a Building Hammer with 4 Planks and 2 Ropes.
Next, put it in the hotbar and hold the left mouse button to open the building menu. From here, hover your mouse over the first tab (Foundation and Floors) and select the last option, which is Foundation Armor.
After selecting Foundation Armor, go to the foundation you want to fortify and click the left mouse button.
Each Foundation Armor costs 1 Metal Ingot and 2 Nails, making it extremely expensive to fortify your raft in the game’s early days.
Unless you have a decent number of Metal Ingots, it’s advisable not to use them extensively for fortifying your base early on. Instead, we recommend preserving them for crafting essential tools and weapons.
You don’t need to fortify all the foundations on your raft since the shark only attacks the outer foundations. Therefore, you should only fortify the border of your raft.
For example, if you build a 10 by 10 raft, you only need to build 38 Foundation Armor.
This is the best method to stop shark attacks in Raft. Once you’ve fortified all outer foundations, the shark will no longer bite your raft.
2. Use Shark Bait
Shark Bait, which is crafted with 2 Ropes and 2 Raw Herrings or 2 Raw Pomfrets, can be used to distract the shark temporarily.
Shark Bait has 800 health points in Easy and Normal mode and 1000 health points in Hard mode.
When you throw Shark Bait into the ocean, the shark will attack it until it’s completely broken, just like with a foundation.
In Easy and Normal mode, Shark Bait lasts 1 minute and 5 seconds. In Hard mode, it lasts 1 minute and 20 seconds.
As Shark Bait is just a temporary way to stop shark attacks, it is only useful when you need to go on a quick scavenging trip on the ocean floor.
3. Leave Your Raft
Exploring islands in Raft is a must, and it becomes particularly challenging when you have to explore large islands while simultaneously worrying about the shark destroying your raft.
Fortunately, the shark won’t attack your raft if you’re in the water (because it’s busy attacking you) or on islands.
However, its attack cooldown still works, which means that, in some cases, it will immediately attack a foundation as soon as you return to your raft.
While this method is relatively safe, staying on islands for too long isn’t ideal, as everything in Raft happens around your raft.
That’s how to stop shark attacks in Raft!
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