I recently built a new gaming PC. I have run Raft on this PC before, and there were no issues. Now, all of a sudden, I get stuck on the "Published by Axolot" screen for a long time, then my PC says Raft.exe is not responding. I've clicked wait for the program to respond a bunch and waited for about half an hour for anything new to happen. A potential problem may be that I set the graphics quality and stuff too high when I last played, and now it is causing problems.
Just for some more clarity, my PC is well above the recommended requirements for raft. (Radeon RX 6600, AMD Ryzen 7700X, 32GB RAM). I have tried everything the internet says. I've made it an exception on all my firewalls, disabled any type of P2P connections, I've reinstalled it many times, I've ran Steam and ran Raft as administrators, I've verified the integrity of the game files many times. I've cleared the config files, I've restarted my PC about a hundred times and absolutely nothing works.