u/Logical_Camel6907

Hello everyone, thank you for your patience! I'm here today with the first part of the results for the unofficial Coral Island popularity contest 2026 (you can see the original post here)! You guys really blew it out of the water - we had a grand 849 participants this year and a once again close race for the top 3.

Like last year, I used a point system (a first place vote would get 3 points, second place gets 2, and third place gets 1). As most people have more than one favourite (or least favourite), this allows for more representative results. Here we have the winners of the "Favourite Dateable" category!

https://preview.redd.it/zuw129z8d9kh1.png?width=2717&format=png&auto=webp&s=614d1a90216a26a3ecf16941d23a2e71f6e43add

https://preview.redd.it/i9lkta8ad9kh1.png?width=2717&format=png&auto=webp&s=700f54bdb4646149d803dd3e31dcaee2e0b29b6b

Agung missed out on the top 3 by 1 vote - which is crazy close. He actually got more votes than Rafael for first and second favourite, but Rafael squeaked by on third place votes to get third place for most favourite.

https://preview.redd.it/2omv9wved9kh1.png?width=2717&format=png&auto=webp&s=e77a944757dbd9292731950b1afcae74bf884bf8

https://preview.redd.it/5wty9q8gd9kh1.png?width=2717&format=png&auto=webp&s=0880fc06d70453c144c277257ba8accbcf7351c4

For "Least Favourite Dateables", it's no surprise Ben took first place again. Though as that one Charles-simp, I am glad to report he's fallen one place again (thanks Mark). On first place least favourite votes, Leah even beat Charles (6% vs 5%).

From taking most and least favourite rankings, we can create an Overall Ranking score!

https://preview.redd.it/4ro6mklld9kh1.png?width=2717&format=png&auto=webp&s=e52ee54b4216df8c191bd98d2145228a7dffcbdc

Just going to let you know ahead of time that I'm going to be breaking this up into parts so it's easier for me to work with and easier for you guys to read. This part is PART 1 - Dateable Popularity Poll. PART 2 - Dateable Comments, PART 3 - Townies, Undateables and Fun Facts, and PART 4 - Player's Voice will be coming out over the next while, but I must admit I am quite busy at the moment so it may be a bit longer before you see those.

I'd like to once again like to thank everyone for taking the time to fill out and share the survey - I've been really blown away by the amount of people who responded to it! I was not expecting to outdo last year's participants (550 lovely people) by this much - thank you again! :)

What do you guys think of these results? There are quite a few upsets from last year's results (see here).

Hello again fine folks! You may remember me as the person who ran the unofficial popularity poll last year (you can see the results HERE). Well, I am here to run another one given that we've got some new dateables to round out the pool to an even 30! If you'd have asked me last year, I'd have told the Raina and Agung-enthusiasts that they were dreaming...

You'll hopefully see the survey up within a week or two, but before I send it out, I wanted to ask the community for some input for things you might like to see in the survey. I've broken up some feedback and my own thoughts below, so let me know what you think :)

Demographics
Full disclosure, my background is in research, so I'm rather familiar with running surveys (though they aren't as fun as this one). When we analyse data in my field, it's very common and useful to use demographics as lenses to view the data through (i.e. people over 50 had a harder time learning the controls for a VR application).

I purposely didn't capture demographics last time, as I wanted to get a snapshot of popularity for the entire community. It is for this same reason that I didn't split the dateables into guys, gals, and non-binary pals. This also made it a more straightforward comparison to the popularity contests from previous years.

While I do think there would be some fun findings from having demographics, I do not feel inclined to include them this time around for the reasons listed above and privacy concerns. I DO however have an alternative, if people are amenable.

Game Data
I did want to include questions about how people play the game last time, but I was worried it would make the survey too long. Some questions I had in mind were:

• How many hours have you played?
• Have you gotten to the Merfolk Kingdom in any of your playthroughs?
• What is your favourite skill?
• What is your favourite season in-game?
• If you had to work for one business in Starlet Town, which would it be?

These sorts of familiarity with the game questions could be used as lenses to view the dateable data instead of demographics, and I think they would more fun and relevant (i.e. people who wanted to work with BOS overwhelmingly wanted Axel as a dateable).

If people have some suggestions for more general game questions to ask, please let me know in the comments!

This would make the survey longer though, so if people thought last year's survey was already too long, please let me know.

Hosting on Reddit
Not much I can do about this one - the mods for the official discord asked me kindly to keep the direct survey off the discord (they have a rule against soliciting data collection), and I intend to honour that. I will however try to do some better advertising, even if that is just directing people here.

If people have recommendations for where other enclaves of Coral Island fans hang out (I have heard word of ~another~ discord), or are willing to spread the word when the survey is live, be my guest. Please do respect the devs and keep the direct survey off the official discord though!

Townies
I only asked for most and least favourite townies last time - do people want a more in-depth look like the dateables (top/ bottom 3 and overall ranking)? Again, I did this because I was worried about length.

Qualitative Comments
I will process out the comments again so we can see what people have to say (see last year's HERE), but I will keep it for a separate post just so the results post isn't extra long. Hope that's alright~

That's generally it - I am intending to keep anything I didn't mention the same as last year. Please let me know your thoughts and opinions and I will do my best to work them into the 2026 survey [unofficial]!