Ideas for future contents of the island

[Momo_Kozuki]

-First of all, more ranks. Prefer to make it a bit slower by making gathering no longer give exp past Rank 10, so that players will focus on other methods. Think of daily beast tribes, except that there is a way to maximize your daily exp income.



-No facility/cabin/landmark location lock: I want my cabin on the top of the hill regardless of convenience, and my fountain in its place to make its look like a small square


-Appearance change for facility/cabin: with themes of major cities in the game. Hingan style, Ishgardian style...


-Smaller plots between buildings and along the roads where you can place things like street lamps, trees, statues...


-Add overhead icons for players to tell animal mood level/hunger gauge, and crop water gauge/water level.



-Hungry pasture animals will come to you themselves when you change to feeding mode.


-Petting mode actually does something than just fluff! A good relationship with animals may give you their children as minions, or variants of existing minions, or even mount! It will require weeks of petting.


-Common and rare animals in pair will have some sort of benefits. A Black sheep and a white sheep pair would give you something nice like extra yield.



-More tools in players' arsenal for QoL improvements. Fertilizer to get higher crop yield/quality. An irrigation system where you can sprinkle water on five fields at once. Animal caring tools that allow players to collect animal's leavings around you make Beckon Mode useful. Upgraded gathering tools that gives you more yields/chance for rare items...


-A way to tell which place to gather which materials on the map, similar to gatherer's guide UI.


-Workshop aside, players can also have their own craft too! I know SE tries to push expert craft/gather to the island, but I think the island should be as self-contained as possible. So, let's say I want to build a mothercrystal imitation to honor Hydelean as a landmark, let me do it with materials on the island. Let me gather materials from the wilds, craft them into building materials and submit it to my construction mammets. Perhaps the mammets will need a break in between too, so it will take a week or more for the construction to complete. Think of Firmament Restoration, but exclusive for solo.


-Gathering wise, I think it would be cooler if it is a bit in-depth than just click and done. Perhaps if you chain materials of the same kind, chance for higher yield will build up.



-Sprint as toggle like in pvp, or just increase players' speed to sprint level as the default.


-Finally, more kind of environment to explore around after you unlock flying. Underground forest cavern, flying isle hidden in the cloud... each with their own environmental gimmick, materials, animals, crops, buildings and tools.

[Reimmi]

A small want
Let me fish on the island for the currency, it can be like the ocean fishing, no level requirement, just lemme fish for relaxation and get some of the currency from fish to turn in ^^

Oh, and i'd like to see gathering "skills" kinda like rune factory.
Example: you have a mining skill that goes up to 600 or something that increases yield from rocks and ore

[Saimeren]

What do you consider to be "weeks of petting"? One pet a day for 3 weeks? 100 pets a day? 1,000?

And how many weeks are you planning on stretching this out over? 2? 5? 19? Can I pump it all out in a single day?

Assuming I spend 8 hours sleeping and account for 3 hours for food, showers, walking the dog ect.. that's 13 hours. If I spam the pet button every 2.5 seconds that's 18,720 head pats.

Are you expecting your minion grind system to take longer than that?

Edit: they already have a gathering guide that tells you where you can gather materials on the island. It might not hold your hand and show you every exact spot, but just walk around there island for a bit and you'll find the best places to get stuff. The island really isn't that big.

Edit 2: People are already crying out "timegating" over having to wait 12 hours for a workshop to be built. You really think they wouldn't react poorly to a single work order taking an entire week? Especially after it costing so much gathering time to begin with? Come on.

[Dreamsoap]

I'm hoping for customization of our facilities, including cabin and landmark. Similar to houses, have models for walls, floor and roofs etc. Having these be longer grinds/ crafts with rare mats would be pretty neat.

[Sclair0]

My big wish is a guest house/cafe for some NPCs to come stat at. I dont need detailed dialogue or anything but seeing the old job mentors visit your little island would be dope

[Syln]

Being able to :

-Queue from everywhere.

-Train creatures of the island to become mounts through a mini game available once every 2 days requiring to be done 10 times.

-Get a customizable house that will work like your personnal bedroom (glam dresser, retainer bell, esthetician bell, personnal dresser, bed that allow you to dc and of course orchestrion) customization system would be the same as every other building but with far more choices that you could unlock through activities on the island.

-Unlock a shit load of gathering mini game.

-Exchange islander's cowries for Seafarer's cowries.

[NekoMataMata]

My big wish is a guest house/cafe for some NPCs to come stat at. I dont need detailed dialogue or anything but seeing the old job mentors visit your little island would be dope

I like this idea. Once you finish a jobs quest line(which could be level 70 or level 80 if we're focusing on specific mentors), then you should have a chance at that mentor(s) showing up on your island with some dialogue. Maybe add some animations of them doing something. Doesn't have to be at a cafe/guest house but they could be anywhere on the island.

So if you finish a monk's legacy for example(don't ask why that's the line that comes to mind) you can have Hamon and Widargelt visit and maybe you'll spot them training on the beach or punching a tree or something.

[Packetdancer]

-First of all, more ranks. Prefer to make it a bit slower by making gathering no longer give exp past Rank 10, so that players will focus on other methods. Think of daily beast tribes, except that there is a way to maximize your daily exp income.

They've said they plan to expand on Island Sanctuary in future patches, so I imagine there may be further ranks in the future. Though, honestly, I think I'd prefer to see lateral growth rather than continued upward ranking. (E.g., to add new systems/functionality you can unlock in parallel, rather than having all future content being necessarily dependent on continuing to rank up indefinitely.)

-Workshop aside, players can also have their own craft too! I know SE tries to push expert craft/gather to the island, but I think the island should be as self-contained as possible.

I'm going to offer a counterpoint here.

Right now, SQEX gives out a lot of rewards -- from content, from seasonal events, etc. -- which are in the form of housing decor. Often outdoor decor, so it doesn't even work with apartments -- think of the cherry tree from a while back, the various festival food or mask stalls/carts, etc.

I think, personally, that I'd prefer to see SQEX giving out things as landmarks or building appearances for Island Sanctuary. Yes, it means there's stuff you can get for Island Sanctuary that you obtain outside of Island Sanctuary... but on the other hand, everyone has Island Sanctuary.

Whereas it's just kind of salt in the wound whenever an event gives out an outdoor housing decor item and half the active playerbase (if not more) does not actually have a house with a yard.

-Sprint as toggle like in pvp, or just increase players' speed to sprint level as the default.

So, fun implementation detail here... Island Sprint is just Sprint. Or, rather, the buff it applies is the normal Sprint buff; it's just that the action which applies that has a much shorter cooldown than the normal Sprint action.

There are reasons for this; the biggest one is probably that you don't want to duplicate Sprint's functionality and create another entire buff, since there's likely a lot of server-side code that special-cases sprint. ("This buff must be removed when you get on a mount." "This buff cannot stack with this other speed buff." Etc.)

So, rather than go duplicate all that code for a second copy of Sprint, you just reuse Sprint.

Okay, so why not just make Island Sprint remove the buff expiration timer on Sprint? Well... given the way the game works, you could go to the island, hit the Island Sprint action and get the Sprint buff with no timer, and then zone somewhere else for Permanent Sprint Power.

Cue maniacal laughter.

(As a side note, you can actually see this in action; if you turn on the Free Company buff that increases the Sprint duration in cities, go to, say, Gridania, hit Sprint, and then teleport somewhere else, your Sprint continues to count down from the longer duration.)

Meaning if you wanted Sprint to be a toggle, you'd now have to have special code that checks "do you have the Sprint buff, does the Sprint buff have a timer, if it does not have a timer and you're not on the island sanctuary then remove the buff"... and that sort of overly-precise special casing is the path to spaghetti code which will come back to haunt you five years later in some unrelated feature.

So as much as it annoys me as a player to keep smacking the Island Sprint action to refresh the sprint buff when gathering (because it's not worth mounting up to walk 20 feet to the next gathering node), wearing a "this sort of stuff used to be my day job" hat I suspect it would be a huge headache to have a persistent/toggled buff.