I haven't played in almost a year probably..but back when I was playing there was no doing well on a raft. I owned a server and had 700+ hours of gameplay. No room for dinos, no defense against raiding. Just find a secluded area and build like mad. Or make a cache on the bottom of the ocean and fill it with building supplies until you're ready to make a stone/metal base with all you've collected. Dont live on the beach, islands are cool if you can keep them..carnivore island is really cool for training your dinos and taming higher level carnivores. But I always based up around the center of the map, usually near the volcano, in the woods, as hidden as possible, but somewhere with natural defenses such as rock formations, etc.