[Effort] SkyBlock without Hub/Public Islands (2025)

This post will be updated as I get new info or find new things.

Hi, I'm BananaMiner, and it's been a while since I made a post.
This is going to be an updated post to one of my older posts I made a little bit more than two years ago: Old Post
I'm actually going to be doing the challenge this time though, my SkyCrypt is here.
(Note that I have a lot of items like specialized hoes in chests because I have to share with my co-op)

If you didn't read that post, basically it's a challenge to see how many collections you can get without leaving your island. I'm going to reword the challenge a little bit differently this time. Basically, the challenge is now how much you are able to progress in general (collections, minions, skyblock exp, skills, combat/farming/mining/foraging/fishing equipment upgrades, etc) without going to a public island.
What defines a public island is basically just any island that you go to to make progress in the game. For example, no Hub, Barn, Gold Mine, Spider Den, Park, Rift, etc. If this wasn't very specific, the islands you are ALLOWED to go to are:
- Private Island
- Garden
- Other People's Island
No other exceptions to these rules ^

I'm going to address a question you might have now:
Why not just play stranded?

Well personally, stranded makes it so most things in the game are possible and doable, so there isn't anything fun about figuring out what's doable and whats not. Stranded makes things that aren't possible and gives (most) it to you, like NPCs, Slayers, Nether stuff, Mining stuff (ores, gemstones, CH stuff). On this profile, we can find what's truly possible in a normal-ish profile without the devs having to feed everything to you (stranded).
If this reason wasn't very satisfying, I'll just say I'm weird and I do weird things ig.

To restate the rules and objectives
- No public islands (info above)
^ This includes using portals or scrolls.
- No trading (it will be an ironman profile)
- Abuse obscure mechanics to make stuff work

I suppose I should start with the collections and how to get them...?
A key part of collections is also minions because minions will be doing a lot of heavy lifting with getting resources. Even useless collections let us get minions that increase the minion cap and give sbexp.

Mining
Wow, you can mine stone I guess? What else could you possibly get!! Not surprisingly, a very small amount of collections are possible.
10/25 collections are possible for mining. Luckily, other skill collections aren't as bad.
Out of these 10, you can get a minion from 7 of these.
Unfortunately, most collections are locked to the mining islands, and some to crimson isles.

You can get cobblestone from mining stone on your island. After that, you can steal from your cobblestone minion and also set up a cobblestone generator. You get one lava bucket and one water bucket from the starter chest. Cobblestone is going to be the only good way to grind mining skill experience.

You can get coal from a trade with oak logs (1 oak log -> 2 coal). However this doesn't increase collection. Using cobblestone and coal from the trade, craft an Auto Smelter.
Place it into your Oak Minion. You will get actual coal which counts towards collection.

Alternatively if you don't have the trade for some reason you can get coal from smelting 9 logs into charcoal, crafting a coal block, and uncompacting the block into normal coal.

Iron is only obtainable in it's enchanted form with fishing up a GREAT CATCH or summoning a Deep Sea Protector from fishing. You need level 18 to spawn them. This is really annoying because you cannot get iron in it's unenchanted form, which is important for Anvils and the Iron Minion. Therefore, enchantment books are kind of pointless in this profile, and getting items that require iron will be super annoying because you cannot use minions and have to do tons of fishing. Why do zombies not drop iron .

Gold can only be obtained in it's enchanted form from fishing up a GREAT CATCH. Annoying similar to Iron.

Diamond is an interesting one, because you can only get it in it's enchanted form from fishing up a GREAT CATCH. However, given resources you have even with the challenge rules, you can still get it's normal form and craft a Diamond Minion.

First you have to fish up 32 enchanted diamonds. Then you unlock the Diamond spreading recipe, which you can put in your minions to get regular diamonds. However, you need jungle vines for diamond spreading, which you can unlock from a trade unlocked in the Jungle collection. After unlocking Jungle Wood and the trade, craft a diamond spreading and use it in a minion for raw diamonds. You can also get a minion once you get 80 diamonds.

Dropped by witches that spawn on your island. Note that the odds are only 50% to drop from a witch and you also need 128 for the first minion, so this collection could take a while to unlock.

First you need to unlock cactus and cane. Then you can use a cactus preset from Garden, which will spawn sand. Collect the sand (doesn't give collection), and then you can use cactus, cane, and sand to make a Desert Island. You can collect sand from the Desert Island, which luckily goes towards collection.

Since there is only one singular lava bucket, you can make ONE obsidian.
You are supposed to get a diamond pickaxe to mine this one obsidian, but using a pickaxe with silk touch also does the job.
However if you choose to use the lava, you can't have lava for the rest of the profile, because lava can only be obtained from Builder in hub (banned), a trade from magma cream collection (unobtainable), or from a Magical Lava Bucket which requires Netherack and unenchanted iron...

Ok so this is a real downer but I actually found a way to obtain lava without any of those methods.
EDIT: OK turns on there is a lava fishing bug that works, you can technically unlock magma cream collection for lava bucket trade. However the tutorial I watched made use of 2 lava sources so maybe you still do this method for the second lava.

You can get lava from placing it down in a plot in your garden, then saving that preset. Use your bucket on your lava, then paste your preset again. You can use the bucket on the lava again and repeat the process. This way you can get obsidian!

To get 80 obsidian for your minion with a Zombie Pickaxe (iron pickaxe) with silk touch, supposing 40 seconds per obsidian, 40*80=3600 seconds, which is 1 hours worth of mining obsidian. (actually a little higher but you can use efficiency maybe to decrease this substantially.) Good luck!

You can get netherrack from using a bug with lava fishing. There are tutorials on YT.
Note that a Netherrack minion does not exist.

Get spruce wood for a taiga biome stick, then use silk touch to mine frozen water.

You can get gravel from these structures that spawn in the Garden. They are rare and only 9 spawn per plot. There are 8 in the tower and there is 1 extra in the "hut" next to the tower to make a total of 9. You need to make sure to have enough fortune to get at least 50 gravel/flint (both count towards collection).
It seems like it might be RNG if these structures spawn in your Garden. I had 3 in Garden, which means 27 pieces of gravel. I also had 100% mining fortune using zombie pick/mining skill/century cake, so 27*2=54, which is enough for the collection. Both flint and gravel count to collection.
- Then, there are non-collection gravel from the spawn of Garden to finish up any you were missing for the minion.

Unless I'm forgetting some obscure thing in the game, these collections should be impossible:
- Lapis - No lapis means no experimentation table or lapis pickaxe.
- Redstone - Why do witches not drop these bro?? Anyways, no redstone means no compactors, super compactors, personal compactors, or accessory bag. These QOL items will really sting to not have, especially super compactors and personal compactors. Accessory bag is an OK loss because there is no Maxwell, but talismans that provide buffs will take up an inventory slot.
- Red Sand/Mycelium/End Stone/Emerald/Quartz/Hard Stone/Mithril/Gemstones/Glacite/Umber/Sulphur/Tungsten - Simply not obtainable without public islands.

Combat
Just so you know, you can't get Combat xp from killing mobs. You literally have to have your MINIONS kill the mobs and then collect the minions XP. So you aren't even doing any combat yourself...
You can get 9/11 of these collections. You can get a minion from all of these collections. Way better than mining!

Dropped by zombies, skeletons, creepers, spiders, endermen, and slime (spawns below y=30).

You can get these collections from using a bug with lava fishing.

Chili pepper/Ghast Tear - can not be fished up, and no Crimson Isle.

Farming
No replenish btw. (except for advanced gardening hoe)
Pasting saving me so much time rn, can't imagine a world where I have to replant all my crops.
You can get 17/17 of these collections, and every minion (14 minions)!

Garden carries most of the crop collections. Other than wheat and seeds, which you can get from getting seeds from starter chest and growing them into wheat, and carrots/potatoes which drop from zombies, other crops shouldn't be obtainable. However, you can get enchanted forms of the crop from pests, then use a preset, which allows you to use enchanted items (i.e. using an Enchanted Carrot would paste 160 carrots into your garden.) Then you can use the normal crops to craft minions/get more crops.
This means you can get Wheat/Seeds/Carrot/Potato/Melon/Pumpkin/Cactus/Mushroom/Sugar Cane/Cocoa Bean/Nether Wart.

For animal collections, you can use a Farmer's Rod to fish up them, then craft minions once you have fished for eternity and gotten enough. This means you can get Mutton(+Wool), Porkchop, Chicken, Feather, Beef, and Leather.

For Rabbit, it might not be possible from Farmer's Rod, but you can fish up a very stronk and buff rabbit called Carrot King, using carrot bait.

This is every collection possible without leaving your island, very cool!

Foraging
Foraging is somewhat important for storages ig.
You can get 4/6 of these collections. You can get a minion from all of these collections.

Accessible on your island.

You can get birch logs from cleaning up plots in your Garden. You can get saplings from those trees too, which you can plant on your island to get wood. Note that trees outside of plot clean-up do not drop collection, but the leaves do drop saplings.

Spawns from a cocoa bean minion, which gives collection. Very crucial to unlock Jungle Axe!

You can get saplings from leaves that spawn from this structure in the Garden!

Acacia/Dark Oak. They don't spawn in Garden, so...

Fishing
You have one singular water bucket which you can fish out of until you unlock water bucket trade.
Fishing rod costs 2 string.
You can get 10/11 collections from fishing, and 2/2 minions!

Can be obtained from fishing. It does take a while to get the fish you need for a fishing minion, but the grind is incredibly short compared to other fishing grinds. For clay, you can drop enchanted versions of it pretty often, which counts towards a big +160 towards collection. Use seeds->clay trade to get clay for the minion (unless you want to fish up a bajillion clays).

Obtained through squids and other sea creatures.

Magmafish - does lava fishing drop this??

Obviously boss and rift collections aren't obtainable.

Ok so that's it! A ton of yapping lol.
Anyways, counting up the collections, and ignoring boss/rift, that is 51/70 collections possible, WITHOUT EVER GOING TO HUB! About 73% (more than 2/3) of the collections is possible without ever going to a public island, which is probably where skyblock players spend 99% of their time. Crazy right?

Now that we have collections out of the way, we can talk about what is the theoretical endgame for this profile.

Mining
Mining is actually kinda light. The progression for mining is
Tool: Wood Pickaxe -> Stone Pickaxe -> Zombie Pickaxe <-> Diamond Pickaxe
Gear: Glowstone Gauntlet. Requires combat 22.
Pet: Silverfish Pet

Zombie Pickaxe because it has an interesting passive that gives you 25 fortune for having undead mobs around you, which can be spawned through minions.
Diamond Pickaxe has more mining speed than Zombie Pickaxe and can break obsidian, but no extra fortune.
Diamonds are also really hard to obtain so you will be stuck with Zombie for a long time anyway.
The only things you will be mining is cobblestone from a cobblestone generator, which gives 1 exp per cobblestone.
There are probably some sweaty cobblegen designs out there, especially since there is auto pick-up.
Mine coal/diamond minion generated ores for rock pet (will take sooooo long, so start early)

*Note that Mining Speed doesn't work on Private Island + Garden. That means tools will use their VANILLA Mining Speed.

Combat
The only mobs you have to fight are sea creatures really. Since different weapons are good at different things, there is a set best item for end game. However, some items are definitely really good while others are mid.

Tools: Stone Sword -> Prismarine Blade (almost irrelevant weapon outside of stranded, but its really affordable and has an OK passive)
After this, a lot of weapons can be used. I will try to get as many as I can, kind of like for museum, except there is no museum, only for flex.
Aspect of the End - TP go brrrr
Zombie Sword - healing yes
Leaping Sword - budget hype (joke)
Ink Wand - massive one hit damage, maybe good for sea creatures?
Pigman Sword - yummy damage
Frozen Scythe - cool weapon
These might be a stretch but...
Golem Sword - only needa fish up 320 enchanted iron! tbh if I was gonna do this much fishing, I'd spend it on a reforge anvil instead
p.s. I got jerry-chine gun massive W

Gear:
The thing about gear is that you are only going to fish sea creatures, so you only want to be using fishing armor anyway.
Unless you want to swap... then...
Early Armor:
Leaflet Armor -> Farm Suit Armor -> Angler Armor -> Salmon Armor (and so on)
Late(r) Armor:
There is no set progression, but Frozen Blaze + Blaze Pet is probably good. (And kinda pointless lol just use fishing gear)
There are a ton of flex/"museum" sets like Zombie Armor and Perfect Armor, but you are going to set up minions for those armor sets, might as well just get FB.
There is also Golem Armor LOL. Fishing 24/7/365 for a useless set of armor fr.

Note that since there is NO anvils, you can't put Hot Potato Books on your items.

Farming
Do farming in Garden. Play like a normal profile.
A major difference is that you don't have access to anvils, so no turbo books or replenish.
There is also no Personal Compactors, so having multiple sacks so you can use super craft (VIP only) is a good idea.
Otherwise, your stash can hold an infinite amount of crops. Use key shortcuts to set /pickupstash and /craft so you can compact items faster, or so you can pick up stash to put more organic matter into the composter.
Be sure to spend your coins on Biofuel; they are the only big coin sink and is very important to get Compost. (except for New Year Cake Bag from talking to Baker from afar and Hitman slots)[+Cookies? Check end of post]
Also reforge anvil is locked behind tons of obsidian and hours of fishing for iron, so it is locked for a while. If you do get one, you can put reforges on your stuff.

Visitor Info:
You will only see the same few visitors because you have to usually talk to the NPC before they can visit you. The most common visitors are Jacob and Anita. Jacob wants wheat, and Anita wants carrots. If Anita gives you a request for Enchanted Golden Carrots, just decline her request.

Use an Advanced Gardening Hoe for all crops until you get specialized tools for them.
Note for Cropie Legs/Gauss Carrot Hoe:
Cropie Leggings requires 30x enchanted golden carrots. You can get enchanted golden carrot from a cricket pest, but the odds are a measly 1%.
That being said, good luck getting 256x for your Gauss Carrot Hoe!

Foraging
Tools: Stone Axe -> Jungle Axe -> Treecapitator(sweat)
Important Item: Sam Scythe, used to clear leaves if an oak tree grows annoying and makes it into one of the really tall kinds with weird branches.
Pet: Ocelot Pet
It's foraging, a very fun skill. Needed for storages (no Sc3k).
Recommend building a huge platform to start growing trees.

Fishing
Gear: Angler -> Salmon -> Sponge -> Diver's -> Shark Scale
Get fisherman equipment set. Clay Bracelet, Clownfish Cloak, Prismarine Necklace, Sponge Belt
Tools: Use what you can for a normal profile, I'm not incredibly well versed in fishing meta.
Vanilla -> Sponge Rod/Prismarine Rod maybe -> Speedster Rod -> Farmer's Rod (use this for a while) -> Challenging Rod -> Rod of Champions -> Rod of Legends -> Rod of the Sea

Note that sea creature chance is nerfed on your island. There is also a trick where you sit in a corner and your hitbox becomes weird or something and some mobs can't damage you (Sea Walkers and Rider of the Deep for example). However, you can slowly chip them down with your weapon.
Since you respawn, you can technically just keep reviving to kill the mob, but you will lose coins every time.

Enchanting
Enchanting is locked behind getting diamonds!!!
Just kidding. You can visit other people's islands and use their enchanting table. You can also eat cake and take placeable fairy souls while you're at it.
Experience is a little hard to come by. I like to smelt cactus in a hyper furnace because it is required for Enchanted Cactus Green anyway, but also potatoes because they are easier to get. You also get xp from fishing and killing pests.
(Note anvils, experimentation tables, reforge anvils don't work on other people's islands. This is such a massive bummer)

Taming
You start getting skill xp for Taming once you equip your first pet. It could be after you get eggs to craft a pet, or maybe you drop one. Anyways my first pet was a Slug Pet.

Social
Kinda useless skill; it's cosmetic. You will get some by visiting someone with an enchantment table/cakes. You can also get social XP from a very cool person visiting your island. However, the XP gain is actually kinda atrociously little? Took a whole day of AFK for someone to get my social on my main to go from 4 to 5.

Alchemy
You can farm Nether Wart + Brew potions. Potions have a bit of use because there are no godpots, but they are limited in time duration because of lack of Redstone

Carpentry/Runecrafting/Dungeoneering
- You have to talk to stupid Carpenter guy and give him wool, which you can't do. That means you are stuck without Quick Craft! Combine this with no redstone for compactors and this makes a really fun combo.
At least super craft exists
- Runecrafting is cosmetic so its whatever
- Do I need to talk about how to get dungeon skill exp? You can't.

EDIT: I didn't want to "necropost" or wtv and bump my post again, so I made a separate post talking about anvils:

Thread 'Predicament (No public islands challenge)'

Feb 18, 2025

Check this post first: https://hypixel.net/threads/effort-skyblock-without-hub-public-islands.5853141/

SO basically I mention how anvils are unobtainable so a lot of enchantments are not usable, but I was kinda lying.
Well kinda
Because you can technically get anvil from getting a cookie.

Which I am going to assume you can buy from the menu. (Even though it says to acquire booster cookies from the hub)

Anvils are incredibly important for many things like replenish, turbo books, farming enchants, hpbs, etc.

Once I get one cookie, in theory I...

BananaMiner_999
Replies: 0
Forum: SkyBlock General Discussion

[Effort] SkyBlock without Hub/Public Islands (2025)

Thread 'Predicament (No public islands challenge)'

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