When players first come across a trading post in Raft, they may not know what to do about it. However, the recycler at the radio tower story island can give them the trash cubes trading posts ask for. Sadly, that doesn't help them get trade coins or access the items on the higher-tier lists.
Fortunately, the trading post already sells the items players will need to improve their reputation. From there, it's a simple matter of putting these items to good use and then selling the results back to the posts to get both coins and reputation points. Players who focus on boosting their reputation will get access to the tier 3 Raft items in no time.
Bait and Fish
The key items players need to buy are the special fishing lures. There's one lure type available on each tier list, and it's always the first listed item. Players can get lures in packs of four for a single trash cube, and each trading post always has five stacks for sale. This gives players a total of 20 fishing lures per tier per visit.
Players can attach these lures to any fishing rod by holding down the right mouse button and clicking on one of the icons that appear. Fishing works the same whether it's with the standard lure or a special lure, but the difference is that special lures pull up strange fish like glowshrimp, sharp carp, and trap snappers. Also, (unlike with regular fish), each special fish caught consumes a lure. Players can't eat or cook these fish, so the only thing they can do is sell them to the trading posts.
Sales and Rewards
Players will have noticed the sale tab on the merchant menu at the trading post. As it turns out, trading posts will only buy the special fish that their lures catch, and in exchange, they give players trade coins and reputation points. The price of a fish depends on which lure catches them, and it's identical for each tier.
- Glowshrimp, netnibblers, and sharp carp are all worth 1 trade coin and 10 reputation points.
- Foamspitters, pufferlisks, and trap snappers are worth 1 trade coin and 100 reputation.
- Lionfish, lunarfish, pentapuses, pink pikes, rainbow lobsters, and sharkeaters provide no reputation (since reputation must be maxed to even catch these fish) but give 2 trade coins.
Players reach tier 2 at 300 reputation and tier 3 at 3000 reputation. This means they need to catch at least 30 tier 1 fish and then 27 tier 2 fish to get access to the full list. After that, players who need more trade coins should always buy tier 3 lures since the cost of each lure type is identical.
The higher tier lists are well worth this investment. Some items are only cosmetic, but most of the blueprints are useful, crafting materials like explosive goo are always helpful, and the advanced scarecrow can keep seagulls off the player's crops for good.
Raft is available now for PC.