Ylands

Ylands is a sandbox building and adventure game from Bohemia Interactive, offering a markedly more colorful, friendlier, and more accessible alternative to their military simulations like Arma or DayZ. Players find themselves on procedurally generated tropical islands, where they can build houses and ships, mine raw materials, hunt and fish, sail the seas, explore underwater caves and ancient ruins full of puzzles, or use extensive built-in tools to create their own scenarios, missions, and minigames, which can then be shared with other players directly within the game.

The visual style is stylized, brightly colored, and simpler in shape, which deliberately sets the game apart from the realistic look of Arma or DayZ, even though it runs on a similar, further modified technology developed by the studio. The emphasis is on creativity, experimentation, and learning – the editor allows players to build their own islands, puzzles, quests, and entire game mods using visual scripting without any need for programming, which brings the game closer to a creative platform than a classic survival title.

Thanks to its accessibility and safer, less bloody tone, Ylands has also found use in education and among younger players, while building a smaller but loyal community of content creators who appreciated the flexibility of the editor compared to the studio's complex simulations. For Bohemia Interactive, it represents a successful step outside the military genre and a demonstration that the studio can offer a more family-friendly, more creative, and more accessible experience for a wider audience alongside its raw simulations. The game also allows hosting your own server and playing in a small group of friends, which makes it a popular choice for family or casual play without having to deal with complex setup. The developers have also long supported community creation through a workshop, thanks to which hundreds of maps and scenarios made by the players themselves have gradually appeared in the game, ranging from simple puzzles to extensive adventures.

Why play it: For families and small groups of friends drawn to a creative and safe sandbox without Bohemia Interactive's usual raw military tone, easy self-hosting of your own server is a major plus.