Islands won't get deleted

[Kagoraschi]

Expected behavior

Resetted, or deleted by admin (/acid delete [name]) islands should be deleted from the map.

Observed/Actual behavior

it doesn't delete resetted/removed by admin islands. I get a message saying ""This island is marked for deletion and is awaiting region cleanup.

Steps/models to reproduce

BentoBox version

bbox plugin version: 3.17.0

Plugin list

Other

No response

[tastybento]

This is expected behaviour as of BentoBox 3.16.1 — not a bug. 👍

When you run /acid delete (or a player does /island reset), the island is removed from the database immediately — the player can create a new island right away. However, the blocks are not cleared on demand any more. They're reaped on the next housekeeping sweep (default: every 24 hours), and until then the area is flagged as deleted, which is the "This island is marked for deletion and is awaiting region cleanup" message you're seeing.

The reason for the delay: BentoBox clears islands by deleting the underlying region files, and a single region file often holds several islands packed close together. To avoid wiping a neighbour's island, BentoBox will only delete a region file once no live island remains in it. So if the deleted island shares its region with active islands, the blocks stay on the map until those neighbours are gone too.

If you don't want to wait for the sweep:

• Force it now: run /bbox admin purge deleted. This reaps every soft-deleted island whose region file is now empty (it skips any region that still hosts a live island).
• Shared region, need it gone immediately: remove the blocks manually with WorldEdit (//pos1 / //pos2 / //set air) or regenerate the chunks. The island is already gone from the database — this is purely cosmetic block removal.
• Restart after purging so Paper's chunk cache clears and the empty area stops rendering.

Full details: https://docs.bentobox.world/en/latest/BentoBox/About/IslandManagement/#island-deletion-admin

We've also just added this as a dedicated FAQ entry and surfaced the FAQ more prominently on the docs homepage, since it's a common question.