The Island Builds a Golf Course

Two days ago the cruise ship ran aground on an island and the post said what the island turned into was for later. Later arrived.

Ashore

The beach is the first thing: the ship still up on the rocks behind you with its gangway down, the luggage and crates and blankets that came off it, and everyone standing around in the sand working out what happens now. The captain is there, and he does not pretend it is fine.

The wrecked ship seen from the shore at night, a wooden gangway running down from it to the beach in the rain. — The way down from the ship.

Inland from the beach the survivors are building a camp, and they are still building it while you walk around. There are finished huts, a kitchen, two shelters that are frames and roof beams, and crews carrying timber and leaves between the material piles and the work sites. Nine of them will talk to you.

A half-built shelter with its timber frame exposed, and crews carrying timber and leaves towards it. — Carriers, carpenters and rope workers, mid-shelter.

And then somebody looks at the meadow

Past the forest path there is a clearing, and it is flat, and this is a golf game. So the survivors make a course out of it.

The part that makes this worth a post: you lay the hole out in the meadow itself. A grid goes over the real grass, you put down a tee, a cup and whatever should be in the way, and the rocks you place are the same rocks you walk around when the grid is off.

The course editor running in the meadow itself: a grid overlaid on the grass, a tee and cup marked, and tool buttons along the bottom. — Designing a hole where you are standing.

Then you walk to the tee and play it. Same field, same ball physics as the course back home, no loading into a separate place to try it.

The same hole being played: the grid gone, the golfer addressing the ball, the flag ahead across the mown strip. — …and then playing it.

Five people keep the grounds. Two push manual reel mowers — no engines on a stranded island — and three walk the meadow sowing grass seed by hand, with the seed drawn falling and landing and fading. They work around whatever you have built, and their routes rebuild themselves when you change the hole.

A groundskeeper pushing a manual reel mower across the meadow, leaving a lighter cut strip behind. — Short, by hand.

The island is on the golf project page now, in its own section under the ship, and it is in the recut trailer. It is all still in development, and there is still no release date.