The gap gets wider: a thousand more kills, and the rest of the island still chasing
Seven days ago X_X T0A5T3D led the island's NPC count with 2,636 kills and 137 hours and 54 minutes on the clock. The board now reads 3,629 kills and 193 hours and 39 minutes, and the honours list confirms it was not a quiet week doing it: 120 separate fighting stretches logged against his name, more than anyone else on the island managed. Second place belongs to Tken, up to 2,707 kills and 142 hours and 44 minutes, which sounds like real ground until you notice the gap between first and second has grown from 717 kills last week to 922 this one. The island appears to have settled the question the standings board was asking: this is not a race anyone else is currently running.
Elsewhere the numbers tell smaller stories that add up to a busy fortnight. Sir Sniffalotapus swiped fifty keycards, more than any other resident. TreeManeZane put in sixty nine separate trips to the planters, the island's busiest farmer, in between logging a Tuesday afternoon life that ran forty seven minutes and produced nothing at all, not a scientist, not a player, not even an animal. Consistency, it turns out, is not the same thing as an eventful week.
The weather held its nerve for most of the week: passing showers Wednesday, a clear Thursday, more passing showers through the weekend, clear again Monday. Tuesday broke it. Squally, the most unsettled day the ledger logged all week, with storm conditions catching nearly one sample in ten and the fog banks thickening well past the island's usual haze. Six calm days, then the one that wasn't.
Nineteen hundred fights, and one name in three columns at once
The island logged 1,947 separate stretches of NPC fighting this week, most of it clustered around the Water Treatment Plant, the Oil Rig platforms and the string of Substations that never seem to fall quiet. X_X T0A5T3D put in more of them than anyone, 120 fights, stacked on top of the NPC count and the hours logged that already carry his name. Three different columns, one resident. A quieter handful spent their week answering the rarer calls instead: Primordial took on a signal_standard drop early Tuesday, with DaveThePleb and Paveway handling basic and premium signals earlier in the week, small errands next to the island's usual grind.
AD22 becomes the address of the week
Keycard doors opened 633 times this week and puzzles gave up their loot 1,164 times, most of it without incident. AD22, the grid reference for the Large Oil Rig, was where the traffic went: TreeManeZane, Buzz, Thick 'Ems, Sir Sniffalotapus and half a dozen others all made the trip out to swipe its level two and level three doors on repeat. Not every lock gave in quickly. One puzzle, logged deep on Friday night, sat untouched for an hour and nineteen minutes before anyone tried it, then took almost nine hours to finally surrender its loot, which makes the three-hour standoff the island argued over last week look almost obliging by comparison.
Six hundred and fifty four trips to the planters
TreeManeZane put in more harvesting sessions than anyone this week, sixty nine of them, working through hemp, pumpkin and wheat without much of a pause. Across the island's 654 recorded growing sessions the same crops kept turning up, hemp and pumpkin and red berry leading the rotation, from Olduk's early pumpkin patch on Wednesday to DirtyHarryPotter's corn late Wednesday night, a full week later.
One life ran eighteen hours, another ran forty seven minutes
Buzz's Monday night ended the way epics do: eighteen hours and eleven minutes alive by the time the life closed itself out, 187 players and 206 scientists left behind it, and just over an hour spent camping inside monuments along the way. Not every life this week aimed so high. TreeManeZane, currently fifth on the island's NPC count for the wipe, logged a Tuesday afternoon that lasted forty seven minutes and closed with nothing to its name: no scientists, no players, not even an animal. Three hundred and sixty two lives ended on the island this week, by the count that keeps score; most of them, mercifully, closer to TreeManeZane's than to Buzz's.
Two scrap at a time, and a Wednesday night that doubled and doubled back
maks.internetov fed the caboose slot machine two scrap at a pull, twenty four times in one Friday afternoon sitting, and came away with two token wins of 25 and 15 scrap for the trouble, otherwise a very expensive twenty minutes. Suwako had the wilder week: seventeen bets placed, more than anyone else on the island, and a Wednesday night at the Large Barn's big wheel that swung from a 506 payout on a 253 bet straight back to three losses of the same size in a row, before a smaller loss closed the account for the night.
Fifteen crates in twenty one minutes
DaveThePleb treated the deeper water like a hallway this week, diving in and surfacing again several times a day between Thursday and Sunday without ever staying down long. The crates themselves paid off better for someone else: ИГРОК surfaced fifteen of them in a single Wednesday afternoon sitting, more than half the island's entire haul of thirty for the week, barely a pause between one crate and the next.
Six hundred scrap sold, ten fish landed
Tken sold more scrap to vendors than anyone this week, 600 of it across two sittings, and maks.internetov landed more fish than anyone else, ten of them spread over four separate days, smallshark and salmon and the odd trout coming up on his lines.
Closing in on last wipe's numbers, one column at a time
Three hundred and twelve elite crates were cracked open first this week and four hundred new skills went into residents' heads, alongside forty purge wins across the island. DaveThePleb claimed more of those first loots than anyone, thirty eight of them, and crass_user took five purge wins, both comfortably ahead of the field. Tken and MB spent a Saturday afternoon at the Large Oil Rig trading the favor, assisting and healing each other three times inside twenty two minutes, the kind of arrangement Large Oil Rig regulars seem to fall into eventually. Measured against the marks left by last wipe, X_X T0A5T3D has already logged more hours this season, 193 hours and 39 minutes, than Yadernij_Gus needed to set the old playtime record of 185, with two weeks still on the clock. His 3,629 NPC kills sit 333 short of crass_user's 3,962 from the wipe before, and his 572 coins looted trail his own old mark of 683 by 111.
Ten columns, ten names
sergey-merkulov's 53.7 hour life is the longest anyone managed to hold onto this week without losing it, the better part of two and a half days without a death. ИГРОК's fifteen crates and Sir Sniffalotapus's fifty keycard swipes both belong to residents who picked one job this week and did it more than anyone else on the island, and Suwako's seventeen bets say much the same about the casino.
Thick 'Ems
Three nights running, Thick 'Ems turned AD22 into a routine. Friday night at 22:54 he swiped a level two card at the Large Oil Rig, took the level three door thirteen minutes later, and had the elite first loot in hand by 23:07, all while fighting off whatever the platform threw at him in between. Saturday he did it again almost to the minute: level two at 23:40, level three and the first loot four minutes after that. Sunday he managed it twice inside the same eleven minutes. In between the rig runs he kept a wider circuit going, Sulfur Quarry, Large Fishing Village, HQM Quarry, Train Yard and Mining Outpost all took a visit, and Thursday night he went fishing at the water's edge, missing one catch before landing an anchovy at 21:56.
By Friday night his current life had already run fifteen hours and twenty three minutes, 128 players and 141 scientists down, with an hour and forty minutes of that spent inside monuments. Monday morning closed the week on a smaller note: a four scrap wheel bet at Large Barn that paid out nothing, followed nine minutes later by six new skills learned back to back, the tidiest possible way to end a losing streak.
Whether X_X T0A5T3D closes the 333 kill gap to crass_user's last-wipe record of 3,962 NPCs before the wipe runs out of days.
Whether Large Oil Rig's crowd at AD22 keeps growing, or whether the island finds a new address to fuss over.
Whether Tuesday's squally break was a one-off, or the start of a wetter run through the back half of the wipe.