Construction Islands

Construction gives every player a private island, a persistent world nobody else can build in. You buy it once from an estate agent, reach it through a home portal in one of six towns, and fill it by placing blocks with your hands and knocking them down with a hammer. Everything you leave standing is still there next time.

Buying the island and choosing a portal

Estate agents stand in Falador, Varrock, Seers' Village, East Ardougne, Rellekka, Pollnivneach and Yanille. Right click one. If you do not own an island, the agent offers you one for 100,000 coins, and that price is the only gate: no quest, no construction level, no skill requirement at all. Pay, and the island is yours for good. Your home portal starts in Rimmington.

Talk to the same agent afterwards and you get the portal menu instead. Home portals stand in Brimhaven, Pollnivneach, Rellekka, Rimmington, Taverley and Yanille, and moving yours costs 1,000 coins. Only the active one works: walk into any of the other five and you are turned away with a reminder of which town yours is set to. The same menu holds a reset that wipes the island and everything on it for 5,000,000 coins, so treat that option carefully.

There are three ways home. The portal is the reliable one. The house teleport spell needs magic level 40 and law, air and earth runes, and it only appears in your spell list once you own an island. If you have earned the construction cape, typing /construction sends you straight there, though it has a cooldown between uses and will not fire while you are in PvP. Wearing that cape on the island also lets you fly around your own build.

Arriving and leaving

You land on a small arrival pad and switch to survival mode, which is what lets you place and break things. Everywhere else in the world you stay in adventure mode and are told you can only build on your island. Walking back onto that pad sends you out again, as does typing /leave. Either way you reappear in your active portal's town.

The island is safe. Damage is cancelled for you and for anyone visiting, so nothing there can kill you. You cannot light a fire on it either, so firemaking has to happen elsewhere. Prayer is friendlier: while you are on your own island the wait between altar recharges is five minutes shorter than normal. The island saves itself every ten minutes, so after a long building session it is worth lingering a moment before you log out.

The hammer loop

Placing is the whole skill. Every placeable block lists a construction level and the XP it pays, both written on the item, and putting it down inside your buildable area grants that XP once. Ordinary blocks start with grass and stone that anyone can place and climb through purpur pillars at 90, with the coloured sets reaching 95. Sand is the one fussy case: it refuses to sit over air or water and tells you so.

Taking blocks back down needs a hammer in your main hand, sold in general stores. Punching a block bare-handed does nothing and simply reminds you to hold one. Click a block with the hammer and it comes away as a BROKEN copy that goes straight to your inventory, doors included, both halves at once. Broken blocks can be placed again at the same level but pay no XP, so rebuilding the same wall over and over trains nothing.

Where blocks come from

Construction stores are scattered across the world, one per category of block, and every one of them is run by a shopkeeper called Zaff. Draynor Village sells plain building blocks. The Lumber Yard covers logs, planks, doors, fences and leaves. Varrock sells decoration, Al Kharid coloured blocks, Falador slabs, Catherby stairs, Burgh de Rott walls, Seers' Village the utility blocks and the Grand Exchange holiday pieces. Simple blocks show unlimited stock. Anything with a recipe is stocked in limited numbers, so you either wait or make it yourself.

Making it yourself is what the Sawmill 3000 is for, and at level one it is the first thing worth placing. Click it on your island and it lists every recipe block you have the level for: logs turn into log blocks, stairs, slabs, planks, fences, doors, trapdoors and fence gates, stone turns into cobblestone, stone brick and their stairs, slabs and walls, and clay turns into dirt, sand and bricks. Crafting pays a tenth of what placing the block pays, so it saves coins rather than training the skill.

Two things to watch. Leaves have no recipe at all, so the sawmill will never make them and the shop is your only source. And the wood names are a trap: oak blocks take oak logs and spruce takes spruce, but birch is made from teak logs, jungle from sequoia, dark oak from yew and acacia from magic logs. Each family climbs in the same order, the log first, then stairs, slabs, planks, leaves, fences, doors, trapdoors and fence gates.

Furnishing the island

Utility blocks are the reason to keep levelling. They are working versions of town furniture: a bank chest, a cooking smoker, a smithing furnace and anvil, a crafting table, a praying altar. Each is placed once, behaves exactly like its counterpart out in the world, and can be knocked down and moved with the hammer like anything else. They cost far more than ordinary blocks, from six figures for the cheapest to several million coins for the highest, and each pays a large one-off lump of XP when placed.

Two are worth singling out. The construction bank chest opens your bank filtered down to what building actually needs: coins, hammers, construction blocks, broken blocks and the raw materials behind them. The lectern turns teleport spells into tablets, one clay plus that spell's runes, from Lumbridge at the low end up to Eagle Peak. You need both the magic level and the construction level of the spell. A finished tablet teleports on a single click with no runes and no level check.

Land limits and visitors

You do not start with the whole island. The arrival chunk is always buildable, and next to it sit six chunks of open ground, three across and two deep. Beyond that the land exists but refuses everything until you buy it. Stand in the chunk you want, type /buy, and confirm. The first extra chunk costs 50,000 coins and each one after that costs 20,000 more than the last, so a wide island is a serious money sink.

Purchasing stops at an eight by eight block of chunks reaching out from the arrival pad, and past that boundary nothing can be bought or built at all. Two smaller exclusions apply everywhere: the arrival pad column itself can never be covered, and the ground directly beneath the arrival platform is protected below surface level. Otherwise build as high as you like, and dig around forty-five blocks down before you hit the island floor.

Islands can be shown off. Type /visit followed by a player's name while you are out in the world and they are standing on their island, and you are teleported across. They have to be on the same server as you. Guests can look but not touch, since their interactions are blocked, so nothing of yours can be moved or taken. Either side can end the visit: /leave sends a guest home, and the owner leaving pushes every guest back to where they came from.