Food for the raft
The raft will not launch without food in your inventory. Cook a stack of meals worth 240 or more each, carry water, and sail with daylight left.
The raft does not run on wood. It runs on what is in your stomach, and a crossing that starts half-fed ends on the wrong beach.
Every figure below is checked against Pequi studios announcements or Steam's own endpoints on 2026-11-09.
The raft will not leave. You have the materials, you have the recipe, you built the thing, and it sits there. The most common sticking point in the game, with a single cause: travel is paid for in food, and no tutorial says so.
Your bag is the fuel tank
Your inventory is the fuel tank. When you board the raft and pick a destination, the game checks what food you are carrying and whether it is enough for the crossing. If it is not, you do not sail. Nothing breaks, nothing is consumed, you simply cannot go.
The check happens when you try to travel, against what you are carrying. Food sitting in a chest at camp is not part of it, which is why provisioning a crossing means loading the bag rather than standing next to a full pantry.
Ten slots, in order
| Slots | Item | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1-4 | Cooked meals | The thing the crossing actually checks |
| 5 | Raw food as backup | Cheaper per slot, if you have the room |
| 6 | Spear | Arriving unarmed on an unknown beach is how runs end |
| 7-8 | Axe and pickaxe | Both are named in the achievement list as core tools |
| 9+ | Empty slots | You came to bring things home |
That last row is the one people forget. A crossing with a full inventory is a wasted trip, because the reason to sail is what is on the other island.
Everything else is your call. The game does not publish a packing list, and the four tools it names outright are the axe, the pickaxe, the spear and the sickle, so those are the ones with a documented reason to be in the bag.
No published rate
The game does not publish a number and does not show one, so the crossing cost has to be learned by trying it. What can be said with confidence is the shape: the raft consumes food from your inventory, the consumption is tied to travelling rather than to elapsed time, and falling short gets you a refused trip rather than a death.
The practical approach is to overpack. Take more than you think the crossing needs and eat the surplus on arrival. Food is cheap once you have a farm, and a wasted trip because you were a few meals short is not.
Why the gate exists
It reads as an arbitrary gate the first time it stops you, and then you sail for the first time and understand it. The archipelago is not a series of levels connected by a menu. A distance, and the game is saying you cannot skip the preparation for it.
The design also explains why cooking is worth doing at all. In a game where a berry would keep you alive, the 240, 1,000 and 1,800 meal thresholds look like achievements for their own sake. Once travel consumes food by value rather than by count, a better meal is literally a longer journey. The three cooking achievements are not a side activity; they are the travel tech tree.
Meal bands as travel ranges
| Meal value | Achievement | Global unlock | What it suggests |
|---|---|---|---|
| 240 | Apprentice Chef | 22.0% | A cooked meal rather than a raw ingredient |
| 1,000 | Feast | 7.8% | Several ingredients in one pot |
| 1,800 | Head Chef | 5.7% | A late-game kitchen |
Only 5.7% of players have cooked a meal worth 1,800, which puts the top cooking band in the same cohort as the players who finished the copper line. Whether a bigger meal buys a longer crossing is not documented anywhere. What is documented is that the game measures meal value at three thresholds and gates travel on carrying food, and those two facts sit next to each other.
Stuck at the dock right now
Work backwards. You need cooked food. To cook you need a pot or a campfire and raw ingredients. Raw ingredients come from fishing, hunting, foraging or a farm. None of those means the problem is food rather than the raft, and the answer is the nearest body of water and a fishing rod.
Fishing is the cheapest route: ten fish is 28.9% of players, and the fishing minigame gets easier on lower difficulties as of the 4 November patch, where the progress bar was made to drain more slowly on Easy. If the fishing bar is beating you, that is a difficulty setting problem, not a skill problem.
Hunting Island, and the wrong-island bug
Before 4 November, selecting Swamp Island on the travel map could put you on Hunting Island instead. Fixed. It matters for this page because it produced a specific kind of confusion: players who thought they had sailed to the wrong place because they were short on food, when in fact they had sailed to the wrong place because of the bug.
The two symptoms look identical from the player's chair. Landing somewhere unexpected on an old build is worth a version check before a food investigation.
Pack the return ration first
The return trip follows the same rule, which catches people who spent everything they brought. Before you leave an island, put aside enough cooked food for the trip home and do not touch it. A player stranded on a far island with a full inventory of iron and no meals is a common story, and the fix is a rule rather than a mechanic: pack the return ration first, then fill the rest.