https://oldwiki.improbableisland.com/

As opposed to this wiki, which would never lie to you. Honest.

Another remnant from The Pilot, the Wiki of Lies was… well. It was a wiki. Much like the one you're looking reading now, but with way worse file structure and way more editors. We had exactly one standard back then¹⁾, so pages were dumped all over the place with reckless disregard for organization.

Despite the frankly bizarre internal structure, the old wiki provides insight to the gameplay of seasons past. Pages were rarely ever deleted, and some guides simply struck out old text when a site feature changed rather than erasing it. It's somewhere between an artsy visual metaphor for how gameplay has grown and changed, and a labyrinth with mysterious in-jokes etched into the walls.

Much like the forums, the Wiki of Lies broke following a server move in 2017. Accounts couldn't be made from that point forward, and existing editors had to wrestle with a barely functioning interface to get shit done. When the fifth²⁾ server move in 2023 smacked it with worse problems, CMJ went “fuck this” and pulled the plug. The old wiki now lies dead, preserved in read-only form, which you can peruse here. Its spirit lives on here. Or something. I dunno. Point is, we plagiarize it constantly.

If there's something you'd like to learn about, use the search bar - the sitemap will get you nowhere. If you see an article there worth preserving - steal it! Click the “view source” button on the side of the page, then copy the result into an appropriate new page here. Keep in mind it won't update links, so be sure to manually edit any ridiculous red links you see to logical namespaces.

For those looking to contribute to this particular wiki, don't ever get nervous about quality. It's true that some of the articles here are a little more wordy³⁾ than they were back then, but we still only have two standards.⁴⁾ There is no minimum wordcount. There is no page structure to adhere to. And if an article is long, it's only because some editors' idea of fun is rambling about video games to a captive audience.⁵⁾

Not worth porting over, just half articles I'm using as “sources”
“why don't you just ask cmj” I like doing things the hard way, apparently.

• The history of the chat channels, circa 2018
• Season Two suggestion box. One way to date what was around before the reset.
• Nobody ever wrote a PVP guide. Hellfire.
• The monster list - retired monsters. also has “possible scavenge options” - not sure if that's the actual scavenging drop data, or just hypotheticals?
• Season one bugs, before it got replaced with the petition system.
• Season Two changelog. Only I could find this interesting.
• jesus. things you post on the internet really do stay forever. hello, person reading this.

• Improbable Island's codebase was, initially, built off a much older game called Legend of the Green Dragon. (Which in itself is apparently based off the single player game Legend of the Red Dragon, but that's a little too much backstory for this)
• Similarities - fight monsters to gain exp, fight your master to level up, at level fifteen you go off to kill the big bad and become the hero of the realm, four hour game days
• LotGD is open source, with its code being CC0. btw you can still donate to the devs so i'll have to shill that at some point
• I should probably play LotGD at some point so I can figure out how different it was to the Pilot
• Anyway link to the Old Masters article somewhere in this mess of a preamble

I'm actually not sure what features the Pilot had gameplay-wise, other than the Old Wiki's entry saying things were super unbalanced. It may have been largely the same as the pilot, but with janky initial stat numbers?

The things I know that did happen are largely community based:

• Occasional Watcher-run contests. (Such as awarding special boons to people who got the highest Glory score in a set timeframe)
• Newbie Tuesdays (days the game would be advertised, so existing players would prepare to welcome them)
• The Watcher apparently hung out on the Island in a place called Disgrace?

• No stamina system - there were separate points for travel, combat, PVP. Systems were in place to convert one type of point for another, such as Heidi's Place allowing you to trade PVP turns for more Jungle fights.
• PVP enabled. Contestants could kick each other's asses for fun and profit.
• Sheila's shack actually had limited stock, and players could salvage scrap from monster fights or the junkyard to craft more gear?? wild
• Speaking of, armor and weapons could be gifted (and stolen!).
• Dwellings instead of Places! i don't actually know anything about the bingo hall i just thought that was a funny headline to steal
• Something called the Strategy Hut - not sure if this was an outpost thing or a player run thing, honestly. Precursor to Basic Training?

• PVP removed, sheila's shack stocks endless stuff
• Dwellings obliterated, places added
• Brand new stamina system, which is currently set to be replaced with the even newer stamina system if the latest motd is anything to go off of
• I don't know when each outpost got its own Banter, but S2 is when Banter became Global.
• Breaches came and went
• Trains. Choo choo
• oo fancy new UI oooo