The Radio Tower Mysteries — Raft’s Post Apocalyptic Story of Climate Change Part 1 (Game Walkthrough)
This the first in a series of guides to the chapter locations of the storyline buried within Raft. Or also, how to obtain all the end game items like engines, bigger storage and automatic water purification for your seat craft.
Video version of this article.
On to the quests… At this time in updates you’re able to make the receiver and antenna very early on in the game after fishing them from barrels, these two pieces of equipment are the means for finding your way to very specific map locations where three main story islands are located. As well as use for subsequent chapter locations. Our 3 Chapter One locations are:
- The Radio Tower
- Vasagatan Island
- Balboa Island
In this guide we’re just covering the first one, The Radio Tower along with the navigation set up needed to find your way to these spots. I’ll do follow ups for the rest and include some of the more interesting sightings that could potentially be part of the lore in each. Saving the spoilers toward the end of the video and will warn before we get there.
RECEIVER & ANTENNA:
Before we talk about the sailing we need a radar to help us find pinpoint locations, note the set up of the receiver requires not one antenna, but three. And they require a special placement that is about 3 foundations apart from each other. But also, they’ve got to be at least on floor above the rafts base. Oh and… they also have to be placed on the same floor as the receiver or within ½ level to create the correct signal. Yeah, yup. We put them down approximately where we hope they’ll work, add a battery in the tray of the receiver, flip on the screen and if the towers are within range a radar will appear showing islands nearby along with their distance from your location. If the antennas aren’t quite in place it will show the errors instead.
The radar puts the player at the center and the dots around you in green are islands, the number below is the distance away. One can roughly tell how fast they are approaching or departing an island by watching how fast the numbers are moving. Story islands will be highlighted in blue. To lock our receiver onto a specific story island, we’ve got to look at our journal by pressing “T”. This is where to find your story progress over the long run but it will also have the coordinates for the Radio Tower. The four digit code is entered into the receiver by using the pressable up and down buttons, plus the lever located on the side to switch inputs. Once the code is in, the blue dot will put up with a distance.
THE RADIO TOWER WALKTHROUGH:
Arrival at the radio tower, it’s time to top up on food and water. Pack some along for the journey as there’s a little to go through and some jumping puzzles involved. The lowest floor is mostly submerged underwater and sharks can still attack while below the water line, so watch your backside.
Your objectives here are finding notes, most importantly the one with the code for your next story location. One note is found underwater in a briefcase that’s jamming a door open, the second and third are found on the lower structure of the tower. Rooms marked B-1 and C-1.
Once those first buildings are sufficiently looted, jump up to the above water deck and take anything that is of interest, to get to the third floor look for a red trash can next to a locker.
Jumping on these will start the path up to the next level of things to grab before finding the stairs, it takes some balance beam work and massive leaps of faith to climb the rest of the way to the wheel house. Across a gap to a broken staircase, then another jump aiming for a narrow platform near an air vent. There’s additional rooms with assorted loot, look for more boxes near the door that will lead to final staircases.
Once inside the wheelhouse you find the last of the notes possible in the steering cabin. The white board in the room has a post it note that we definitely want for coordinates, but also note the blueprint laying about because that headlight upgrade comes in handy shortly. When finally done getting everything you want, bail off this decaying structure and set back out for water with this new set of coordinates punched into the radar controls.
This is the point where the spoilers come in, might want to click away.
Note Review:
Elusive plot line building… nice!
Alright, so it seems like from looking at these notes and trying to make sense of them, a team of engineers was sent to this area to work on some new technology, reactors that may have been some of the last functional left on the planet. The first few notes appear to be diary entries about dangerous work and suspicions about the employers that sent them there.
It’s part given recounts through left behind communications and a whole lot of speculation. From already finishing quest progress on another world I can say that it continues to carry this pattern of quest line storytelling through the end of Chapter 2. What is developing here looks like it could be quite sinister, listen to this particular sequence from events within the notes collected at the radio tower:
“They left us behind on the reactor testing platform, then blew the foundations. The water’s been rising slowly. Owl thinks we should go after them. I wish I didn’t agree with him.”
As best as I can tell from the other notes left behind, “Them” is this stranded engineer’s employer, who shipped him here along with 3 others to do maintenance on a prototype nuclear powered plant or engine of some kind. Owl being one of the coded names given to the workers because of ongoing scrutiny to their project. This technology is suffering failures but the rich people still wanted it anyway and left some of the engineers for dead while taking another to keep the machines running. The remaining people on the sinking platform were able to make it to the radio tower and we find the diary entries left behind as well as a list of radio traces. The diary vaguely walks us through a whistleblower starting a chain of events that landed them in this situation, little doodles start showing up after a couple notes in, then of course there are the notes left all over the walls. It suggests the writer was starting to struggle with not only the guilt from their situation but also with isolation effects. The list of radio traces reveals a sequence of events, first a distress call followed by a connection but inability to communicate effectively due to language barrier. Later a gunshot is heard and the com connection is lost. As things continue to deteriorate on the radio tower, they seek another location and leave behind the note for their friend to follow. Well, this went from 0–100 real quick, the threats in this world aren’t just endless ocean, sharks or starvation, we also get to worry about rich people’s antics.
It’s somehow not surprising to hear wealthy people might be capable of disregarding human life and hella leaving this engineering to die while taking the engine they did find valuable. Rich people are pirates. I know a bunch of them, thick as thieves they are in the exotic car scene. It’s full of fraudsters and human traffickers. No, I’m not exaggerating this. Actually working on a video about it for another series, science behind why rich people are more unethical than average citizens. A billionaire will definitely leave you for dead, unfortunately I know that first hand but that’s a story for another time. Tangaroa’s a huge zone, there’s some fun podcasts featuring social studies done on the wealthy. Amusing they are.
But back to the story in Raft because the last note is a post-it with coordinates for the receiver and just one word, “People?”. It’s found on a white board with an interesting photo that might be a clue about future story. The word “Utopia?”, question mark. Can we have hope that some day there will be one, or at least dry ground civilized society? It can even literally have the name Utopia and it’s cool. As long as it’s a civilized society.
The lack of it is starting to show in the story line, characters look like they’re a little Cuckoo, the codename for the engineer that’s writing these notes. This board has gotten a change at some point from the original story release, it used to contain several newspaper articles that indicate the cause of our watery surroundings. Not entirely sure why they were removed, but something similar pops up later on in the game. There’s actually front pages plastered all over different surfaces in the story modes that have some clues and I’ll get to them as those zones come along. If you get up close to them, some of the headlines to the articles can be read by squinting at your computer screen. They get… pretty, darn interesting. Somewhat tells a timeline of pretty dystopian stuff that goes beyond the hinted climate change. Other sinister societal themes were not left out and it’s what actually makes this story line ever increasingly engaging. I think it definitely got Trustworthy, no longer than we had located the coordinates for the next location and made our way back to the raft, he had the numbers punched into the receiver with the anchor raised. Because…. People… Question Mark. We have a lot to speculate about with the current clues, what is going on with these prototypes and what purpose do the rich folk have for them or the engineer they took with them to provide fixes. What happened to the other end of the radio connection? That’s a cliffhanger of a radio transmission, but what does it all mean?!
We’ll… hopefully find out in future story guides.
We can imagine that perhaps Mike was starting to suffer psychologically from isolation effects. Might explain why he felt the need to tell us that he named the shark Bruce, would have understandably thought Bruce was even a hallucination but evidence of a shredded cage indicates perhaps the shark was not a lie. What areas of Mike’s brain started to shut down to benefit his adaptation to the new environment around him? And would it affect his ability to escape? For being such a brightly colored and beautiful game, there’s a very dark and unsettling side. Who needs zombies or monsters when reality is so much scarier?
But time for us all to get back to fishing for trash, hopefully this video was helpful in finding your way to the first chapter story progress in raft and you’ll be enjoying your new engines shortly. Check out the video version for bonus content.
