Minecraft. What a nice calming game. Creepers blowing you up in survival? Better get used to it. Sky’s the limit in creative, until you realize that you have extremely limited knowledge of redstone and building. Even better, live a life of luxury in Skyblock, stranded on islands and living off of lava and water, before you accidentally turn your lava into obsidian because you forgot how to make a generator. A nice, relaxing block game with updates that add so much variety…
Oh, wait. You’re broke, and your mom hid her credit card after you spent half of her retirement money on robux. Now, you can’t buy Minecraft. Now, you have to find an alternative, or else you’ll be casted out of your friend group.
No, I’m not talking about pirating Minecraft. That’s illegal. You shouldn’t do that.
No. I’m talking about Islands, which is Minecraft… but in Roblox.
What is Islands?
Islands (Formerly Skyblox, but they got copyright struck) is a Roblox game made by Snicktrix. it has similar graphics and a similar central idea to Minecraft. Mine materials like wood, stone, iron, diamonds, gold, obsidian, et cetera. You then take these resources and craft things. You can smelt iron and gold ore in furnaces to get iron and gold, and you can get many different types of weapons. Sounds familiar?
However, there is much that sets these two games apart. First of all, there isn’t really an “ender dragon”. The closest thing to that is the Infernal Dragon, which dwells in the underworld. Instead, you go gather resources and use those to either build up your island or sell it for coins, which you can use to get items that will help you get coins faster. Does this also sound familiar? That’s right. Islands is Animal Crossing… but in Minecraft.
Mobs in Islands
Like Minecraft, there are mobs. However, you fight them on other islands. No hostile mobs can spawn on your island, but instead, there are other islands, which you can access with a portal on your island. You have to bridge to the portal, as the island the portal’s on is separate from your spawning island. However, after you get to the portal, it opens up mob islands, more crops, and iron.
You need to get a weapon before you can access mob islands. Even then, you can’t get to the others unless you get EXP for combat, which you can get from defeating mobs. You can slay slimes, battle buffalkors, mess with the gizzards of the wizard lizards, get into a skirmish with the skorps, cause carnage with the crabs, and so much more.
There are bosses for each mob island (except for the buffalkor island, but there’s an extension of it that serves as the boss), all with different abilities and stats. These usually either drop the same common drop that the regular mobs of the island drop, plus the chance for an additional award or two, or only drop the regular drops, just with raised chances for rare drops.
The only mobs that can spawn on your island are passive. This includes rabbits, frogs, and fireflies. You can use spawn eggs (which you can buy from the animal keeper on another island) to get livestock, which then can be utilized to obtain items to sell.
Crops in Islands
There are a variety of crops in Islands, which you can farm, replant, and cook with.
Some of them are like sweet berry bushes in Minecraft. You can harvest them without having to replant them. This includes the berry bushes and fruit trees. However, all of the other crops require for you to replant them.
However, you can skip that replanting process by using totems. There are totems for crops and blocks, but crop totems automatically replant seeds and store harvested crops. Crop totems pick up the crops that the totem is used for (for example, onion totems pick up onion plants) in a 7×7 area around it, and replant them.
You can buy crops from the seeds merchant, as well as saplings. You can only get more berry seeds from the harvesting berries, with a small chance, and you spawn with one berry seed.
Like in Animal Crossing, there’s a native fruit tree to your island, which can be apples, oranges, or lemons. They all sell for the same amount, with no foreign fruit bonus. You can only get fruit saplings of different types from other islands. There are also avocado trees, which you can buy from the seeds merchant.
There are currently 6 different types of wood you can get, all with different crafting recipes and trees (breaking fruit trees result in plain oak wood). If you get the hedges gamepass, you can use leaf clippers to get leaves to make hedges, which can add some variety to your islands and, as an added bonus, count as full blocks, as opposed to the berry bushes, which don’t serve as obstacles.
Redstone in Islands
There isn’t redstone in Islands, but there are multiple mechanics that act like redstone.
The most well known, and most easily accessible, are the conveyors. Conveyors are similar to hoppers in Minecraft, except instead of storing and transferring things, it just moves things along, like water. They can store items into industrial chests. Conveyors allow for automated smelting, woodcutting, stonecutting, farming, cooking, and mining.
You can craft drills and use them to farm deposits, Which will randomly spawn on your island every 18-24 hours in real time.
There’s a special quirk with the conveyors that all totems will drop what they’re storing onto the conveyor, allowing for automation for cooking, smelting, and farming.
After that, is electricity, which you can use to get a different type of conveyor and lights that can turn off. Electrical items are purely cosmetic, and used to make minigames.
Lastly, there’s oil. Oil requires an oil deposit to be collected using a pumpjack, and can be used to automate the collection of fruits on fruit trees and the automation for planting saplings. Oil is still in development, so more uses can come.
Events in Islands
Islands runs on a server, so there aren’t really “save slots”. Each generated island looks the same, unlike Animal Crossing and Minecraft. However, like Minecraft servers, sometimes the server owner (The creator and developers of the game) will host events. These events can give you exclusive items, most just for shows.
Most of the events give you trophies. Some of them give you actually useful items, like the Godzilla staff from the Godzilla versus Kong event. However, most of them are purely cosmetic.
Events are held often on islands, and usually last around 2-3 weeks.
The EXP System
If you’re doing almost anything in Islands, you’re gaining XP. XP works differently in Minecraft. Instead of letting you use the anvil and enchant, XP in Islands is basically mastery. There are many fields where you can get XP, from mining, to forgery, to combat. Each one gives you a bonus in their corresponding field, and there are certain milestones where you unlock crafting recipes.
Visiting Other Peoples’ Islands
You may notice a set of buttons to the left of your screen. Specifically, the ‘explore’ button.
If you press the button, it’ll prompt up a menu, which has your friends (If any of yours are playing Islands), the other people in the server, and lastly, a list of published islands.
You may notice that most of the published islands have “shop” or “drop” in the title. If so, you came to the right place. People can publish their islands with the PRO Gamepass, which costs 20 dollars. They can then use vending machines to sell items to people in exchange for coins or buy items from people.
The Economy
Believe it or not, Islands has an economy, and a pretty good one, too.
Changes are made to the economy whenever there are major updates or there’s a bug that affects the economy. An infamous example of this the Economy Wipe of 2021, which happened on January. This happened due to duplication glitches, allowing for mass production of rare items. Each item had an allowed capacity, and if you went above that, the items above the allowed capacity would be wiped.
The Islands economy revolves around player trading and shops, and each item has a average value assigned to it. For example, Starfruit totems have an assigned value of 150,000 coins, spellbook pages have an assigned value of 3000, and so on.
Event items, due to their finite supply, have a scarcity value applied to them. Some event items do absolutely nothing but are worth millions. An example of this is an industrial smelter, which is extremely useful in the automation of iron, steel, gold, and copper, is worth around 1.3 million. A wide snowman from the Christmas 2020 event, which does nothing but sit there, is worth 35 million. That’s almost 30 times the amount, for something that does nothing.
Items recently introduced, regardless of how easy they are to get, have extra value applied to them. This includes fruits, which were worth 5 times their actual worth, in the first month of them being introduced.
Bedwars
Pretty recently, Bedwars was added to Islands as an alternative to the Bedwars in Minecraft. It functions the exact same as the Bedwars in Minecraft. You gather resources, buy items to help you win, and break other teams’ beds so the players on those teams can’t respawn. If your team is the last standing, you win.
There are kits, which you can equip to give you the upper hand. Most of the kits either cost robux or require a battle pass, but there are 3 free ones you can start with.
The Takeaway
Overall, Islands is a very complex game. It has many things that lead to another, systems that lead to the unintentional automation of many items, and even has it’s own economy which fluctuates based on the community’s needs. However, you very much don’t have to understand all of these mechanics to enjoy that game. You don’t have to understand saturation to eat food in Minecraft.
So, while your waiting for your parents to unground you, play Islands or something.
