Designer's Island
Designer Island is a closed zone where Blizzard's designers test content. In the early builds it was a real island off the coast of the Eastern Kingdoms, and a few players found a way there. What they saw became one of the best stories of the beta.
The island in the beta
According to players who reached it, the island was a designer's toybox: every kind of ore and herb laid out in neat rows, trainers and mount vendors friendly to both factions, a forge, a working cannon, a flying ship circling overhead, giant level 1 squirrels with test loot, and a huge building shaped like a sea shell. The players who got there were suspended, and Blizzard moved the island out of the world into Development Land, a separate test map that players cannot reach.
WoW Secrets: Designer Island · Hayven Games
Test quests and the squirrels
The island has its own test quests in the game data: Kill Stuff, Collect Things, Darren's Bombing Run of Awesomeness, Waskily Wabbits! and others. The most famous, Clayton's Quest: Extreme!!, asked players to kill 255 Evil Squirrels on Designer Island. It circulated among players for years until it was removed in Warlords of Draenor.
The Dragon Isles, years early
Warcraft Wiki keeps a render of the Dragon Isles placed on Designer Island, a test of a landmass that only became a real expansion with Dragonflight in 2022.
From the archive
During the beta, Designer's Island really was an island. It sat out past the open water, so getting there meant bending the rules a little. Once a handful of players were caught looting the place, every one of them got a 72-hour suspension and the island was moved into an instance.
Original Lost WOW write-up
Mira Duskwood is the pen name of the Lost WOW editorial team. Mira writes the secret walkthroughs and the history of the lost areas, and keeps them up to date when a patch changes something.
- How this page was made. Every step was checked against at least two independent sources (Warcraft Wiki, Wowhead and Icy Veins), and against the patch notes for anything that changed over time.
- Last updated . When a patch moves a step or breaks a puzzle, the page is corrected and the date changes.
- Spotted a mistake? Tell us and it gets fixed. Read the editorial policy.
Videos
More videos of the same place from YouTube, old and new.
