The truth is, these flowers don’t help with survival. Raft players can eventually use flowers to generate honey from beehives, but as inventory items, flowers have no impact on a player’s survival odds. However, what they can do with flowers is create paint, and this paint is a very nice way to customize a raft.
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Finding and Growing Flowers
The first thing players must do if they want to create paint is gather flowers. Flowers grow exclusively on tropical biome islands, and they come in five colors: white, black, red, blue, and yellow. When players gather flowers from islands, they also get a seed, and they can plant these seeds in small and medium crop plots.
However, when players harvest flowers from crop plots, they only have a 50 percent chance to get a seed. This means they’ll need to visit tropical islands regularly to get a consistent flower supply. This changes when players upgrade to advanced crop plots because one of their hidden benefits is a seed drop rate of 100 percent.
Something to note about flowers is that players can stack a lot more of them into one inventory space than normal. 20 is the limit for most materials, including flower seeds, but flowers themselves can stack up to 50 high in a single square. This means players can afford to gather large amounts of flowers even before they research and build a paint mill.
The Paint Mill
The paint mill is a fairly simple object that only needs planks, scrap, rope, and stone. Once researched, players will find the paint mill under the decorations tab in the crafting menu. It sits next to the paintbrush, which players will need to actually apply their paint.
The paint mill uses a water wheel to spin a barrel that turns flowers into paint, so the only place it can go is on the edge of the raft. This means the paint mill is vulnerable to a shark attack, so players should either reinforce the foundation square the mill sits on or create a hole in the raft where the mill wheel can access the water safely.
The paint mill can hold up to five flowers at a time, and these flowers can be any combination of colors. In less than a minute, the flowers will turn into paint buckets that players can collect. Each of the three colorful flowers creates 18 units of paint, and the black and white flowers both create 24 units of paint.
Also, because the paint mill uses a water wheel, the raft needs to be moving for the paint mill to operate. However, it doesn’t have to keep moving. In fact, if the raft is at anchor and players use the paddle once, the paint mill will get all the movement it needs to start creating paint.
One last thing is that, much like flowers, players can stack large amounts of paint in a single inventory space. The limit is 600 for each square.
Raft is available now on PC.
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