All the news the island lets us print
Vol. 2026-08No. 4PvE Zombies edition
Week threeEarly edition
TheFlyingCow logs the season's most hours and still can't catch TooBy
Twenty days into the season, TooBy still owns the top of the board, now sitting on 175 hours and 39 minutes with 3,426 NPCs down, up from 123 hours and 2,573 kills a week ago. The runner-up's chair changed hands, though. Baldilocks has climbed to second with 2,955 NPCs and 1,357 barrels, pushing last issue's second place finisher, CyanN, back to fourth on 172 hours and 59 minutes. TheFlyingCow, in third, logged more raw hours than anyone on the sheet, 181 hours and 40 minutes, and still finished 515 NPCs short of the lead. CyanN did lead the top ten somewhere: 370 coins looted, the best haul of the week. BudsMcKenzie needed 1,850 barrels, more than any other name in the top ten, to hold sixth.
The island's own ledger grew to 122.4 thousand NPCs killed and 74.1 thousand barrels looted, up from 96.6 thousand and 62.2 thousand a week back, with 8,888 hours now logged by 710 residents. The sky spent the week making up its mind. Wednesday brought showers, Thursday went almost clear, Friday turned squally with fog banking to 0.55, and Saturday's thunder pushed 21 percent of its samples unsettled. Tuesday closed the week as the roughest yet, heavy rain turning up in 28 percent of the day's readings.
BudsMcKenzie's 1,850 barrels bought a sixth place finish and, one assumes, a sore back. The island counts effort the way it counts everything else: eventually, and unevenly.
Grid O31 gets robbed the same way three times
The elite crate sitting behind grid O31 changed hands three times this week, and every resident who cracked it ran the identical route: a level one and two swipe at O31 itself, a level three swipe next door at N31, then the crate. BudsMcKenzie went first at 22:36 Wednesday, D3ViL||CaT followed at 00:34 Thursday, and inspectorwong closed it out at 02:08 the same morning. Elsewhere the puzzle rooms kept their usual split personality: one room gave up its loot fifty seconds after unlocking, while another held out for six hours and fifty nine minutes before anyone bothered to finish it, at 04:09 Thursday.
Eighty scraps with scientists, none with each other
Between 22:00 Wednesday and just past two in the morning Thursday, the log recorded eighty separate NPC skirmishes, sweeping through Launch Site, both Substations, Radtown, the Dome, the Airfield, Ferry Terminal, and Harbor_Large among others. sanchodadirty put down Patrol Helicopter three times in that stretch and wuzth4tm3 twice more, for eight Patrol Heli kills before sunrise. The tougher heli_nightmare variant went down as well, to Zaxaries at 23:47 Wednesday and to dumefrick eleven minutes later. Not one of those eighty entries logged a resident against another resident. Whatever fighting happened this week, the scientists took all of it.
Ten crops cross the counter, still no two genes alike
Corn, hemp, potato, pumpkin, wheat, a rose, and red, blue, yellow, and white berries all came up out of the ground this week, ten varieties in all, and the gene strings still refused to repeat. Away from the soil, two life-story reports stood out from the rest of the field. Mithos stayed alive ten hours and ten minutes in a single life, long enough to put down 131 residents and eighteen scientists along the way, while Bandit's own nine hour stretch closed with 124 scientists to its name and just under a minute of logged sleep.
The scrap vendor triples its own ceiling, twice
The vendor usually tops out at 750 scrap a run, but this week it paid 2,250 three separate times, to sanchodadirty on Friday evening and to duncan52 and Furry Gang within three hours of each other on Saturday. The shredder kept pace, taking ten cars apart on Friday between 12:43 and 16:02, none of them claimed by a name in the log. Overhead the same afternoon, UnbracedFall's parachute covered 1,363 meters in 7.7 seconds off a 79 meter deploy, while Bubbalish floated a mere 405 meters over a leisurely 31.5 seconds four minutes later. Down at the dock, Di Sisto's landed seven fish across the week, trout, perch, and catfish in no particular order.
TooBy doubles up in one bet, König gets there the slow way
TooBy needed exactly one wager to make the week's biggest score: 353 scrap on the wheel at 06:34 Thursday, back as 706 forty four seconds later. König took the scenic route to a smaller prize, cycling small bets through the small hours before a 10 scrap wager finally returned 110 at 01:03 Thursday and a 6 scrap follow-up turned into 36 three minutes after that. At the slot machine, Thow fed the caboose two scrap at a time for the better part of ten minutes and twice pulled a 125 scrap return off a 10 scrap spin, the best multiplier on offer all week.
Van clears the seabed, forty one crates in just over an hour
Between 15:28 and 16:32 Monday, Van surfaced with an underwater crate forty one times without much of a break. Earlier in the week the diving was more of a group outing: dkc led three others down for over an hour on Thursday morning before anyone came back up, and inspectorwong made two separate trips into the deep on Sunday, each lasting roughly thirty six minutes.
Kaaz claims nine crates, mungo learns fifteen skills in a minute
Kaaz spent the small hours of Thursday bouncing between grids H6 and H7, claiming elite first loot nine times between 00:26 and 00:50, one short of TooBy's fourteen from last issue's report. A little later, mungo banked a purge win at 02:51 and then put away fifteen new skills in sixty three seconds flat, 03:06 to 03:07 Thursday. Three other residents also walked away with purge wins this week: MalcolmReynolds14 at 22:42 Wednesday, wuzth4tm3 at 00:10 Thursday, and TheFlyingCow at 01:35 the same morning. Elsewhere on the ledger, König found time to play a tune on something with keys, twice, logged seconds apart, the kind of stat nobody chases but the board keeps anyway.
Last issue asked whether CyanN's extra hours would close the 190 NPC gap on TooBy. Instead the gap grew to 985, and CyanN slipped from second to fourth. You have to wonder if hours were ever the metric that mattered.
Masatron's four grid, one purge night from two issues back never turned into a climb. The account sits eighth this week on a fraction of the season's playtime, and Saturday's thundery weather turned out to be one rough afternoon among several, not the start of anything. Watch whether the season's last full week keeps that pattern or hands the finale a proper storm.
With eight days left, watch whether TooBy's lead holds all the way to the finale, whether Kaaz's nine crate night at H6 and H7 turns into a real run at the top ten, and whether grid O31 gets robbed a fourth time before the wipe.