Your quest to rebuild the world in Idle Arks starts out on a lone beach and with Adam, your first survivor. Survivors are important members of your crew – without them, the arks will never be built and your raft will sink.
Your first course of action is to gather up some wood. There are two main currencies in Idle Arks: wood and gems, although gems are the premium currency of the game.
To gather wood, you have to rotate the camera around by swiping the screen. Look for driftwood floating by, then tap on it to make Adam swim out and retrieve it. Once he brings it back to the raft, it will be added to your overall wood count.
In addition to the wood, you may also see bottles floating around. These bottles contain random messages that offer you some insight about life, but they are otherwise worthless, so you can go ahead and ignore them if you want.
You are very dependent on random driftwood for the early portions of each chapter, so make sure that you keep an eye out for more as it drifts by.
You may even seen golden chests, and these are special chests that will reward you with a ton of wood but you have to watch an advertisement before you can open them. If you do not want to deal with ads, they can be safely ignored.