Albion island beginner guide

Update: I've found disturbing things and warn you from playing Albion Online. Stay away!

Talking about "get everything from ... instanced": islands. Every premium account using character can have an island. You can buy and upgrade it at the island vendor in any Royal city center:
You can visit your island from this merchant or from any travel agent. You can visit other character's islands if they gave you permission. You can give permission to others from a board on the island. But it's currently not important, you have one island at start. What is an island good for?

• You can build crafting and processing buildings in it that you can use or let others use it for a fee. However, your buildings on the islands have no resource discount. More about this tomorrow.
• You can build farms and kennels to harvest crops and raise livestock. It will be discussed later.
• You can build houses and hire laborers. It will be discussed later.

The level 1 island has one building plot, in the middle. The other levels have farms, more buildings and 2 small building spots:

Level	Price (K)	Farms	Buildings
2	18.8	1	2
3	62.5	2	4
4	187.5	3	6
5	625	4	8
6	1250	5	11

Farms are technically buildings and can be built the same way as others. To build, you first need to check or set your hotkey, because Sandbox Interactive in their infinite wisdom did not add a "build" interface element on the default screen:
Then press the key and a red building shadow appears. Move yourself to the center of the plot and it turns green:
Press the "build" button and you get a construction site. Click it and it brings up the interface on the left. Go and get the materials it needs. Please don't farm rough logs yourself, just buy it. Carry them back to the construction site, and start pressing that hammer icon on the interface. For some weird reason, one press only gives 30 materials, so your next 5-10 minutes will be "click button, wait 30 secs":
Wonderful, you have a good-for-nothing novice (T2) building. Time to upgrade it. Click on the face of the operator and select upgrade. It needs more materials which work the same way as building, except with a different interface (why?):
On the top of the management, there are three bars: usage, damage and food. You won't see damage in your private island. Usage bar refills over time. If it is low, you are overusing the building, build another one, because depleted buildings need extra food to operate. Food decreases with use, you must refill it:
Congratulations, you can now craft on your island. It doesn't mean you should, please wait for tomorrow's post. Please note that travel between the island and its creation city is free, to other cities it's the same cost as between that city and the creator city. So select the city you want to use carefully, because you are locked to it then.