System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

The Floating Islands

Top-7% content that nobody could find, reach, or land on. All three problems have since been fixed

Five great islands hang far out in the sky, each its own self-contained biome with unique enemies, a unique boss, and unique loot — reachable only by aircraft (Glider, Seaplane, Blackbird or Saucer), by flying out toward the marker and descending onto the deck.

"No hitboxes and no purpose"

That's a direct quote of the original complaint about these islands, and investigating it turned up two genuinely separate, unrelated bugs rather than one.

The hitboxes were real on foot, but not in the air. Measured directly: dropping onto an island's deck from height stopped a walking character dead at exactly the deck's own altitude — solid ground. But an aircraft's only collision check reads the ground terrain heightfield, and a floating island was never painted into it, so a plane flown straight at one passed clean through like fog. Since an aircraft is the only way to reach these islands at all, that made the "no hitboxes" complaint effectively true for anyone actually trying to visit. Fixed by giving flight its own separate solidity check — a deck cylinder plus an inverted tapering cone matching the island's actual built shape — so an aircraft now stops at the same rock a walking character always did.

The islands were never actually empty — they just couldn't be found. A direct measurement found ten island-exclusive weapons occupying ranks 9, 10 and 11 out of a 135-weapon ladder — all ten inside the top 17% — five bosses running 9,000-11,000 HP for 4,200-4,800 XP each, and twenty island-only crafting materials with their own recipes already built elsewhere. By every one of those measures this is top-7% content. What was actually broken was visibility: the islands sit far out at considerable altitude, well past the camera's draw distance and deep inside the game's fog range, so from the ground they weren't merely easy to miss — they were never rendered at all. A stub function for their own minimap markers had been left as a single comment with no code underneath it since the islands were first built. Fixed by filling that stub in, using the same rule every other map marker uses: an island's marker appears only once the ground chunk directly beneath it has actually been explored — earned by flying there, the same way a town or a crater earns its own marker by being walked to first.

Version history

• Floating Islands added — five sky biomes, each with its own enemies, boss, and unique loot, streamed in as the player's aircraft approaches.
• Aircraft collision fixed, closing the "no hitboxes" half of the original complaint by giving flight its own island-shaped solidity check independent of the ground heightfield.
• Minimap markers added, closing the "no purpose" half — not by adding content (there was already plenty), but by making the existing top-tier content actually discoverable for the first time.
• The Windward Mooring added — a follow-up audit found that even once found and fought, the islands' own twenty unique materials had nowhere to spend. A mooring raised beside each landing pad finally gives them one.

Trivia

• The "no purpose" complaint turned out to be the opposite of true — by weapon rank and boss difficulty this is genuinely some of the hardest-hitting content in the game. The actual fault was that it was invisible, not that it was empty.
• Flying underneath an island is deliberately still possible even after the collision fix — the solid shape is a tapering cone that narrows toward its point, not a solid cylinder all the way down, so the space below the tip and outside the taper was always meant to stay open airspace.
• An island's underside used to be a perfectly smooth, flat-coloured cone with no rock texture at all — the single largest object on each island had the least visual detail of anything on it. Every island now wears the same weathered rock surface the game's ordinary boulders use, bumped into a genuinely rough, uneven shape rather than a mathematically perfect taper, while still keeping its own distinct tint underneath — Ashfall Spire's rock reads dark, Frostwind Shelf's reads pale.