You're going to be scavenging for nearly everything you need in Raft, pulling various bits of flotsam and jetsam from the waters and turning them into anything useable for your journey.
Usually, these crafted materials merely help you survive in the violent waters of the post-apocalypse; anything from pointy sticks to help fend off shark attacks to make-shift breathing apparatus, so you can explore the murky depths. With the full release of Raft, however, comes a new creatable, and tradable resource called trash cubes.
What Are Trash Cubes
Well, they're cubes made from trash, obviously. In a slightly less literal sense, they are a craftable resource used to barter at any Trading Post you might find on an island. They can be exchanged for all manner of things, from fishing bait to rare resources like titanium ore. They can be a very useful way to gain vending machine tokens, as the bait you can buy from the Trading Posts can be used to catch fish to sell back to the same post. The rare resources you can purchase from the Trading Posts can only be bought once you hit a certain reputation with them, something that can be earned by selling items back to them, so having a lot of trash cubes at your disposal will give you an excellent starting point for purchasing the end game products on sale.
How To Get Trash Cubes
You can craft trash cubes on your Raft using a piece of machinery called a recycler. You'll find the blueprint for the recycler from the first story location, at the Radio Tower (the same place you meet Tala). Once the blueprint is in your possession you can go about finding the resources to build it.
You'll need:
- 6 Plastic
- 4 Metal Ingots
- 2 Bolts/Hinges
- 1 Circuit Board
You'll also need a battery in order to power the device, this can be made with:
- 3 Scrap
- 6 Plastic
- 1 Copper Ingot
The recycler works similarly to a lot of the other stations on your raft, you feed it things, and it makes other things. In this case, the recycler will take nearly anything organic, and over the course of a few minutes it compacts it and spits out a trash cube. You'll notice that when you add a piece of organic material to the recycler, the level of trash inside increases visually. Depending on what you insert into the device, the number of resources it has to work with will change. Throwing a stone into the recycler? Not a lot of gain to what it can work with. Metal ore, however, sees quite a noticeable bump in its progress.
All those stones and palm leaves you've been ignoring for hours are now very useful. Ensure you're picking up anything you can find and feeding it to the recycler.
Trash cubes will give you a reason to collect all that junk, and a reason to recycle (not that anyone should need a reason, mind). They make the end-game craftable devices a lot easier to complete by buying and selling at the Trading Posts, and you'll feel much better about yourself when doing it.