All the news the island lets us print
Vol. 2026-09No. 4PvE Zombies edition
Week threeEarly edition
At Y4, TooBy sends the favor back
Sunday afternoon, 14:09, grid Y4: TooBy put a rocket into Cuttlefish at zero range, the same square where a week earlier Cuttlefish had done exactly the same thing to him. The island keeps a memory for grids like that. Two days later a second feud opened at E24, where Bubbalish and ThAtGuYRMo traded four kills across three days, two grenades and a rocket splitting the difference, the score sitting even when the week closed.
Further up the board, last week's records belonged to TooBy: most NPCs killed, most coins looted, most hours logged, all set as of last issue. They belong to Tom Cruise now. His 2,615 NPCs killed lead TooBy's 2,560 by fifty five, his 601 coins looted clear his own last wipe record of 526, and his 170 hours and 6 minutes on the island lead the wipe outright, though shadow1100cc's 240.7 hours from last season are still a little over seventy hours clear of him. At the Bandit Camp wheel on Thursday, CyanN and Tom Cruise spent over twenty minutes trading four figure bets before CyanN walked off with a payout the island's records put at 22,000 scrap, the biggest single win anyone has managed this wipe.
Monday was the week's one truly clear day. On either side of it Sunday and Tuesday both turned squally, storms turning up on Tuesday about one sample in twenty, fog banks thickening to 0.55 against the island's usual haze near 0.35, while Wednesday through Saturday saw nothing worse than passing showers. Season to date the island has logged 94.3 thousand NPCs killed, 64.9 thousand barrels looted and 7,381 hours between 596 residents, with eight days left to add to it.
E24 and Y4 turn personal this week
The island logged 1,594 separate stretches of fighting against scientists and wildlife this week, most of it at Abandoned Supermarket, the Substation lines and the Military Tunnel. Almost none of that turned into anything personal, but the seven kills that did carried more history than usual. Sunday at 14:09, at Y4, TooBy put a rocket into Cuttlefish at zero range, the exact reversal of the shot Cuttlefish landed on him at the same grid last week. Saturday night and Monday evening, Bubbalish and ThAtGuYRMo turned E24 into their own private argument, two grenade kills apiece and a rocket besides, four kills in three days on the same square. Amaray put in more fighting sessions than anyone else on the island, fifty three of them.
AF13 and W13 keep doing the same business, week after week
Keycards turned 532 times this week and puzzles gave up their contents 1,413 times, with 98 crates started across the map. Large Oil Rig's AF13 crate opened eight times this week, six different residents taking a turn, Tom Cruise responsible for three of those visits alone. Military Tunnel's W13 door opened six times over the same stretch, King_Quackers accounting for two of those runs himself. Tom Cruise swiped more keycards than anyone else on the island, eighty of them.
CyanN walks away from Bandit Camp with 22,000 scrap
The wheel at Bandit Camp took 171 bets this week and the machines returned 168 gambling outcomes, thirty three of them payouts. Thursday afternoon, CyanN and Tom Cruise spent over twenty minutes trading four figure bets at the same table, CyanN pulling an 8,000 scrap payout at 17:01 alone; by the week's end the island's records had him down for a single win worth 22,000 scrap, the biggest anyone has managed this wipe. WhoAmI took the opposite approach on Wednesday afternoon, working the wheel in bets as small as five and ten scrap, twenty eight of them by the time he stopped.
Goat Scientist surfaces ten crates before lunch
Twenty crates came up out of the water this week against ten deep traversals. Goat Scientist supplied half the week's total alone, ten crates surfaced in just under eleven minutes on Wednesday, one after another without coming up for air. MMJ13 and Skillzy each matched the pace if not the total, five crates apiece in under a minute and a half on their own dives. chaseam0113 took the slower route, an hour and sixteen minutes underwater on Wednesday afternoon, the longest single dive the week produced.
The same red berry keeps turning up in planters across the island
The planters logged 241 harvest sessions this week and 413 lives besides, hemp and berries filling most of the gaps. One genotype did more than its share of the work: the red berry strain GGYGYY came out of shadow1100cc's planters three times this week and Kruuzco's twice more, the kind of consistency that suggests everyone is cloning from the same stock rather than rolling their own. Gabrio put in more sessions at the planters than anyone else, twenty three of them.
Every car the island shredded this week went in the same morning
Vendors changed hands fifty times this week, DocSavage's four trades worth 750 scrap apiece adding up to 3,000, more than anyone else sold. Every one of the week's eleven shredded cars went into the machine inside the same twenty five minute stretch on Saturday morning, no names attached to any of it. Fifteen fish came out of the water against twenty failed lines, and ryanj7246 alone landed five of them in a fifty four minute session Thursday evening, losing a line for nearly every catch. TooBy jumped twice on Saturday afternoon, both parachutes carrying him just over two kilometers, the second deploying at nine meters with well under a second of canopy before he hit the ground.
291 scientists, one life, nineteen hours
Lil-Vato's Wednesday life ran nineteen hours and eleven minutes, twelve of them out in the wild, and closed with two hundred ninety one scientists dead alongside sixty eight residents and thirteen animals, the heaviest single tally the island logged all week. Slickp7 took the opposite shape entirely: twenty six hours and thirty five minutes alive, twenty three of them at base and six and a half of those asleep, and still came away with a hundred ninety five scientists dead, proof a good base does some of its killing without its owner watching. Not every life earned its keep: one wander through the wild lasted an hour and forty minutes and ended with nothing to show for it at all, no players, no scientists, not even a rabbit.
Tom Cruise takes over every column this wipe, but not the ones from last
This wipe's board changed hands entirely this week. Tom Cruise now leads NPCs killed with 2,615, fifty five ahead of TooBy's 2,560, leads coins looted with 601, and leads hours logged at 170 hours and 6 minutes. All three are personal territory: his own coin record from last wipe was 526, and he has already cleared it by seventy five. What he has not cleared is last wipe's other marks, still standing untouched: TooBy's 3,626 NPC kills are 1,011 clear of him, and shadow1100cc's 240.7 hours are still a little over seventy hours out of reach with eight days left to close it. Elsewhere the board logged 277 skills learned, 328 elite first-loots and 62 purge wins this week, of which ☭ Бабай ☭ won more than anyone else, four.
Ten crates, twenty two thousand scrap, and fifty three fights with the scientists
Goat Scientist surfaced more crates than anyone this week, ten of them before lunch on Wednesday. CyanN's 22,000 scrap payout at the Bandit Camp wheel dwarfs anything else the casino produced. And Amaray spent more time trading blows with scientists than anyone else on the island, fifty three separate fights across the week.
Nubert
Nubert spent much of the week working the same door at Train Yard, grid L24, swiping into it at level one Friday afternoon and again at level two by Saturday evening, with stops at Oxum's Gas Station and Mining Outpost in between for the scientists who got in the way. The best of it came Friday night: a life that opened at 21:24 and ran three hours and thirteen minutes, ending with thirty residents and sixty scientists dead before it closed, more than half that time spent out in the wild rather than at home.
It did not all go his way. Saturday afternoon at H19, at 13:13, a grenade from Bulletproof Borzoi cut one of his lives short. He answered with three purge wins across the week, Saturday, Sunday and Monday apiece, and kept learning between fights, eight new skills picked up along the way. Sunday afternoon he put 312 scrap on the Bandit Camp wheel and lost the lot, and by Monday morning he was back at Train Yard's L24 door for a second run at the level two lock, twenty players and sixty four scientists into a two and a half hour life before the week's log runs out.
Whether Tom Cruise can hold a fifty five kill, twenty six coin lead over TooBy through the board's last full week before the finale.
Whether E24 gets a decider, with Bubbalish and ThAtGuYRMo sitting two kills apiece and eight days left to settle it.
Whether the eight days left are enough for anyone to close on shadow1100cc's 240.7 hour record, with Tom Cruise the closest at seventy hours short.