Island Survival, Michael Deering's April 2014 challenge, has one rule on top of hardcore: stay on the island and never go into the sea. Basket's team is eight players on the GopherCraft server, and this month they talk over positional voice, so you only hear whoever is standing close. The episode opens with a short edited intro in which a ship sets sail, a storm hits and the wreck ends up on a sandy beach. Then it is day one, with nothing in anyone's hands.
Can you hear me now?
The chat shows Max_Writer, PsychoSFK and lostinthefort joining, and within a minute it is full of achievements from Sayulily, Steel_Douglas, Scoti_Garbidis, optimus1971 and Basket as everyone punches trees. One player explains the audio: "it'll make it hard for us to hear each other and someone will die and no one will know." Crafting benches go down everywhere. "Whoa, who broke my crafting bench?"
Salt water is lava
The sea is off limits, and the team treats it that way. "Remember you can't get in the salt water, salt water's poisonous." "Don't touch the water, it's lava." Someone tries the edge cases: "If you use a fishing pole, is it part of you, and are you leaving the island?" The month's rules also forbid killing passive mobs without breeding replacements, so animals matter: "Do you see any animals yet that we can start breeding?" Cows and chickens turn up near a freshwater lake, a chicken ends up in a hole, and the chicken house needs light before something spawns in it.
A terrible place for a house
Basket gets a crafting table and furnace going in the grass, and the chat shows Time to Strike! for a stone sword just as the sun goes down. Since they were shipwrecked, one idea is to "build a couple lighthouses." A small house of sand and stone goes up, and not everyone loves where it is. "This is a terrible place for a house." "That was my house!" At nightfall the team packs inside.
Into the mineshaft
The plan for the night is to dig. "We're heading down for now. And we're gonna dig, and we're gonna try to get some materials." The tunnels open into an old mineshaft with wooden supports. "There's tons of iron down here." Food is short. "I have no food." "Here, here, I got three bread." Then the voice chat erupts: "Witch! Witch!" "I killed the witch. The witch is dead." "I'm down to three hearts. I need food." The screen does not show the fight or who was hurt. On Basket's screen, Scoti_Garbidis stands close in the tunnel while Basket eats an apple.
Iron in the furnace
"I have a lava source down here." Deeper in the mineshaft, lava pools between the supports. Back at a crafting table under the beams, Basket smelts iron, and the chat shows Hot Topic and then Acquire Hardware. Another furnace gets built from cobblestone. Someone floats the next idea: "if we can get a couple people fishing."
The chat shows no deaths, so all eight are still in the game at the end of day one, underground with stone tools, the first iron smelted and two apples left in Basket's hotbar. The credits roll after that, and nothing comes after them.