Lock Raft and Shield in Build and Defend Your Raft

Two emergency buttons can save your raft: Lock Raft and Shield. They look similar and do very different things — and both punish you for panicking at the wrong moment. Here is what each one actually does.

Lock Raft

Locking your raft makes it immune to attack and boarding while active.

• Stops incoming cannon fire and keeps raiders off your deck.
• It does not last forever. Locks expire and re-enter cooldown — attackers openly plan around it: “he has got a lock… but not for long.” Treat it as a pause button, not an invincibility cloak.
• Exact duration and cooldown numbers are not published; from combat footage it is a short window measured in seconds of protection per cooldown cycle.
• You can waste it. New players hit Lock the moment a scary raft sails past, then get attacked minutes later with the button still cooling down. It is a common enough mistake that “wasted my lock” is a rite of passage.

Use Lock when:

• A raid starts and you are mid-build or mid-harvest.
• You are escaping a losing fight and need the pursuer to disengage.
• You are logged on but AFK at an island stop.

Do not Lock when:

• You are the raider (it signals fear and accomplishes nothing).
• The fight is already won.

Build and Defend Your Raft — Full Gameplay with Lock and Shield

Shield

The Shield is a deployable force field that blocks attacks — most notably cannon fire — while it is up.

• It is a separate button from Lock Raft; they can be part of the same defense plan (Shield the raft, Lock if boarding starts).
• It can be moved and repositioned like a build piece — keep it deeper in the raft, not on the bow where boarding hands find it.
• You can accidentally activate it and burn its window (reported by multiple players) — check before blaming the game when shots still land.
• One-minute shield: every player gets brief spawn protection when joining a server. Use it to orient, not to attack.

The panic-button hierarchy

When a raid starts, in order:

1. Drive. Moving changes everything — cannon accuracy drops on moving targets and the dev team has observed damage landing harder while moving. Escape beats fight for most rafts.
2. Shield if cannons are already hitting you.
3. Lock only if boarders are on the deck or you need 30 uninterrupted seconds to finish an upgrade.
4. Fight or flee — but never all four at once.

Known quirks

• Buttons live in the HUD near your hotbar; on mobile they are tap targets. The September 1 patch fixed several mobile building bugs, so if your build menu misbehaves mid-shield, update first.
• Lock and Shield do not protect you from sharks — the ocean does not care about your force field.
• A raft with nobody home cannot use either button. The Crew button is still the first defense.

Related pages

• Best defense guide — making raids not happen at all
• Cannons guide — the firepower your shield protects
• How to raid — how attackers time your cooldowns