How to play Raft on Mac

Raft is a challenging game that throws you into an ocean with a group of friends and tasks you with surviving all manner of water-based dangers. Especially sharks, similarly to Stranded Deep. However, there’s one nagging issue with the game that’s preventing many players from even contemplating dipping their toes into its waters. It’s only available on Windows PC.

Rather than go out and buy a dedicated gaming PC for this single title, we’ve put together this guide for a couple of workarounds that will get Raft running on your Mac.

Run Windows with Boot Camp

Boot Camp is the method that we’d recommend you use. It’s a native application that every Mac user has access to, and it’ll allow you to run Windows on your device with minimal setup. Open your search bar and start typing ‘Boot Camp Assistant.’ When you see this, double click it to open the application. This will take you through a step-by-step setup guide for getting windows running on your Mac.

You’ll need to have a decent amount of space on your hard drive to use Boot Camp. The application will partition a section of it from the rest of your Mac. Then you’ll be guided through the process of downloading and installing a copy of Windows to that partition.

Once you’ve set everything up, you can load up the Windows partition by turning on your Mac and holding the ‘Shift’ key. This will present you with two login options. One is your normal Mac, and the other is the Windows partition. Once you’ve logged into the Windows partition, you can use it like any Windows PC. Make sure you download Steam and buy Raft so that you can download it and play it. Otherwise, all of that effort will be fruitless.

That’s all there is to using Boot Camp. It’s certainly the easiest option for running Windows and playing Raft on a Mac, but it’s not the only one.

Run Windows using Parallels

The second way to get Raft running on your Mac is by installing Windows Parallels. This is a piece of software that is simple to set up, but it will cost you. The price on the official website is roughly $100. Once downloaded, all you need to do is follow the install process, and you’ll be able to load up the program from your Mac whenever you log in.

You’ll still need to download Steam to the virtual Windows machine, but you won’t have to partition your hard drive and hold a button every time you turn your device on.

Buy a Windows PC

If no other option on this list will work for you then you’re left with little other choices than to buy a Windows PC. Raft isn’t a demanding game, so you could buy a fairly cheap gaming PC just to run it, but if you want to enable yourself to get into PC gaming then it’s probably a good idea to buy something with a bit more oomph. We’d recommend this option only if you want to get into PC gaming or if your Mac needs to be upgraded anyway.

Related: The best pre-built gaming PCs under $1000 (2020)

No native version of Raft for Mac

The bottom line is that you can’t get Raft to run on a Mac without using one of the above options. The game is still in early access at the time of writing, so a Mac version is still a long time off — if one is even planned. If you want to get in on this silly multiplayer game, then get Windows running on your machine and head out into the vast wide ocean.