Cannons in Build and Defend Your Raft

Cannons are your raft’s teeth. They fire on their own, they track targets that have been spotted, and they are the difference between a raft that raids and a raft that gets raided. This guide covers everything confirmed about how cannons actually behave — including the September 6 additions.

Cannons are fully automatic

You do not aim or fire cannons — place them and they engage on their own. Players have verified this repeatedly in the official Discord: park next to a target and the cannons open up without any input. The moment a cannon spots a raider in its angle, it fires.

Build and Defend Your Raft — Full Gameplay with Cannons and Net Cap

How targeting works

The mechanics, as confirmed by the dev team answering players in the official Discord:

• Cannons do not shoot through your own walls.
• Once a cannon has seen a target, it keeps tracking that player — if they run to the far side of your base but stay inside the cannon’s firing angle, it keeps shooting.
• Placement that blocks the cannon’s view — your own walls, a second deck above — takes cannons out of the fight. One player watched their second-floor cannons refuse to fire until the layout opened up.

Practical rule: cannons need line of sight to the water where raiders approach. Front and side edges, unblocked, pointing at open sea. If you put a wall in front of a cannon after building upward, that cannon is now decoration.

The 4-cannon cap

You start with a placement cap of four cannons. The Raft Weapons upgrade in the Crafting Table’s upgrade tab raises the cap (it covers turrets too) and costs 150 wood + 110 metal + 70 scrap.

Metal is the bottleneck — cannons are expensive in metal specifically, which is why barrel runs and raiding matter. See the resources guide for the fastest metal routes. Until that upgrade lands, four is your ceiling.

Cannon damage: the wood-wall problem

Low-level cannons are surprisingly weak against structures. Combat logs from the game’s own Discord describe players “breaking my metal structures while I cannot crack their wood walls” — meaning raw, unupgraded cannons struggle to demolish even basic building pieces.

Two consequences:

1. Upgrade your cannons before planning sieges; upgraded cannon damage is what actually deletes rafts.
2. Boarding beats bombarding early on. Until your cannons are upgraded, a sword raid on foot does more structural damage than a broadside.

Cannons also have average accuracy — moving rafts eat a lot of misses. Do not expect sniping; expect suppression.

Placement patterns that work

• The broadside: cannons in a row along one open flank. Turn that flank toward your target and delete it.
• The quad guard: one cannon per corner, each with clear water view — best all-around defense for solo players.
• The chaser: front-mounted cannons on a fast raft for raiding — engage while closing the distance.

The Mortar: close-range shells with open-sky rules (September 6)

The September 6 patch added the Mortar, a defensive piece that lobs homing explosive shells at enemies who board your raft:

• It is close range — it defends the deck, not the water lane. Cannons still own the perimeter.
• Shells home in, so it catches the sprint-to-the-chest play that plain turrets can whiff on.
• It requires open sky: no roofed section above it.
• Upgrades via the Hammer (Tier III available in the store); destroyed defenses now rebuild themselves after a fight.

Balance note from the same patch: Harpoon range was reduced for Tiers 2-4, so pulling loot from extreme distance is weaker than it was.

Cannon versus turret

Turrets are the sister defense piece: shorter detection range, and they lean anti-personnel while cannons lean anti-structure. The full comparison lives in the turrets guide — short version: cannons to break rafts, turrets to shred boarders.

Related pages

• Turrets guide — the anti-personnel complement
• Best defense guide — full layouts
• Lock Raft and shield — what happens when cannons are not enough
• How to raid — what cannons look like from the attacker’s side