Starsand Island Crossover Guide: Dragging Portia and Sandrock NPCs to Your New Life
If you thought moving to a remote island would finally let you escape the needy residents of Portia and Sandrock, I have some terrible news for you.
I just wanted to farm in peace and avoid my past mistakes. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug though, and Starsand Island actually lets you import four familiar faces to ruin your quiet beachfront property. Unlocking Gust, Ginger, Fang, and Nia isn't exactly handed to you on a silver platter. You have to bust your ass doing manual labor to fix the local transit system before any of them even think about visiting. I spent entirely too much time figuring out the exact seasonal triggers and stalking their daily routines so you don't have to suffer through the guesswork.
Fixing That Damn Train Station
Look, nobody is swimming to this island. Your first major roadblock is the absolute wreck of a train station sitting on the eastern edge of the map.
Solara will eventually pester you to help the construction crew rebuild the thing. I highly recommend dropping whatever you are doing and hoarding the required materials to finish this job immediately. If you procrastinate and ignore the building requirements, you will miss the seasonal arrival windows. Missing those means screwing yourself out of seeing these characters for an agonizingly long time. Grind out the wood and stone, hand it over, and get those tracks operational.
The Portia Siblings Arrival
The Portia snobs are the first to show up, assuming your transit system isn't still a pile of rubble by late summer.
Check your mailbox on Summer 23. Solara drops a letter mentioning Gust and Ginger are pulling into town. You actually have to drag yourself over to the station to trigger their arrival cutscene. The quest logs as "Visitor From Portia" in your journal. Once you get through the awkward introductions, they settle into their own separate houses and function exactly like normal islanders. You can chat them up, throw gifts at them, and attempt to romance them all over again.
Tracking Down the Sandrock Crew
Autumn brings the desert dwellers to the island. As soon as Autumn 1 rolls around, Fang and Nia will hitch a ride on the newly repaired train.
They don't get the same flashy introduction letter as the Portia siblings, so you have to be proactive and go look for them at the station. Tracking these two down on a daily basis is actually a bit easier. You can use the social app on your in-game phone to pinpoint their exact coordinates on the map. It is basically state-sponsored stalking, but it saves you from running in circles. Just keep in mind that the game completely locks you out of their private rooms until you put in the work and grind up their relationship meters.
It takes a bit of seasonal waiting and resource hoarding to make it happen. Getting these four characters onto your island makes the daily social grind a hell of a lot more entertaining though.
