---
number: 29
title: The floating islands — a trial build where the neighbouring places float beside the one you stand in
date: 2026-09-15
summary: A trial APK, pointed at the staging server, that draws the public Areas next to yours on the world map as static islands floating around the one you are walking on — Market Stalls, Mountain Pass and Golem Hollow around the Village — reachable only through their doors as ever. Built to measure what it costs a phone and to see whether the world should be islands in the sky.
epic: world-map-and-portals
status: delivered
artifacts: ["docs/handoff/neighbouring-islands.md"]
cta: [object Object]
---

Kris is working on the sky behind the world — what replaces the plain blue — and one of the
ideas is that each Area is a floating island, and that the places laid out beside each other on
the world map could be seen from each other. This build tries exactly that, on the staging
server so nothing about the live world changes.

## What it does

- While you stand in an Area, the public Areas within a radius of it on the world map are drawn
  as static islands around you: their ground only, on a rock skirt, a gap away and a little
  below. No creatures, no items, no bodies, nothing moves on them. You still cross by portal.
- The ground of each island is cached on the phone by its content digest, so returning to a
  place costs nothing, and a publish of an Area's ground tells every connected client to fetch
  it again the next time it is drawn.
- Homes are never drawn. An Area you may not enter is not drawn.

## How to try it

Open [spellgrove.com/play-islands](https://spellgrove.com/play-islands) — the web build, pointed
at the staging realm — or install `spellgrove-islands-trial.apk` from that page beside the normal
app. Staging has the same authored world and **its own accounts**: make one with an email on the
title screen (a live account will not sign in here, and Play Games sign-in is not set up on
staging). Walk into the Village and look around; zoom out. The HUD's frame time is the measurement.

## Where it lives

The code is on the `islands-trial` branch, not on master, behind a director flag that staging
alone has set; the write-up is `docs/handoff/neighbouring-islands.md`. Whether it becomes part
of the game is Kris's call after the sky design lands.