Sprinkle Islands high scores, by level

I started playing the iPad version of the game Sprinkle Islands on January 1, 2025, and I’ve played it a whole lot since then. It’s nonviolent, and in fact it’s a great game for kids. Each of the 60 levels (which come in five sets of 12, each set being on a specific island on Saturn’s moon Titan) requires thinking through a little puzzle about how to put out some fires with a water hose. Once you’ve come up with a strategy — which fire to put out first, how to remove obstacles in your way, and so on — your goal becomes to minimize the amount of water you use to implement that strategy; your score for the level is based on how much water you have left in your tank when you are done. Each level is independent of the others, and you can replay each one as often as you like in order to improve your score. Here’s a link to Sprinkle Islands on the iOS App Store in case you want to take a look.

When I started looking at the leaderboards on Apple’s Game Center, I noticed right away that there are a bunch of obviously fake scores at the top. Most of them were probably produced by hacking the system that reports scores to Game Center, but I think some were produced by unofficial mods of the game that let you play without having the water level in your tank go down. I’ll say more about this below, but here is a YouTube video showing someone playing a hacked Android version that does exactly this.

So I wondered two things: First, if you could somehow manage to complete a level without using any water — like the modded version lets you do — what would your score for that level be? And second, what are the actual high scores that people have attained for each level? Game Center lets you see the top scores per island, but not broken down into the 12 individual levels on each island.

I was curious about the level high scores because I wanted to know which levels I should be focusing on to improve my scores. If you know that someone has scored 1000 more points than you have on a given level, then it’s likely that you’re missing some kind of useful strategy.

I have been unable to find any listing anywhere of the best scores per level. So I’ve decided to post my own scores, in the hope that they might be helpful for people currently playing the game who are in the situation I had found myself in: trying to figure out what levels to focus on in the hopes of improving their global high score. Currently, I have the highest Game Center score on each island, once the likely cheaters are removed, so my scores might be near the best possible.

In the tables below, I list the following information. First, my estimate for the point value of a completely full water tank. Second, the number of points you can get by knocking down the little insects that buzz around some levels. (Some people call them “fireflies,” and you get 100 points for each one you knock down with water.) Third, whether there is a power-up on the level that you can use to refill your water tank. (Sometimes these are very well-hidden, so I put “?” instead of “no” on levels where I have not found one, because maybe they are there but I just haven’t found them yet!) Fourth, the resulting upper bound on the highest possible score. And fifth, my own score for the level, as of July 15, 2026.

After the tables, I will describe how I came up with the estimates for the point value of a full water tank, and how I have identified some people on Game Center as cheaters. (Or, at least, people whose scores have some irregularity.)

To estimate the number of points you would get for a full tank, I took screenshots of each game level, and then measured the markings on the water tank. The lowest mark is the 2000-point level, and the highest is the 5000-point level. By counting the number of pixels between the 2000-point mark and the 5000-point mark, and the number of pixels between the 5000-point mark and top of the tank, you can compute the number of points you would get for a full tank. The measurements are only precise up to a few pixels, so once I got an initial figure I rounded it to the nearest “nice” number, which here I take to mean “a number ending in 000, 250, 333, 500, 667, or 750.” Initially I had skipped the rounding step, but the YouTube video (linked above) of the modded version shows that the full-tank scores are nicely round like this.

Using these tables, it is easy to identify the most egregious cheaters, because their scores on one or more levels are far higher than the scores you would get if you ended a level with a full tank. And some of these jerks have simply inserted themselves in the global high scores without even bothering to fake high scores for the individual islands.

(*The Forest Island score for user 杰1232 51 is not above the used-no-water cutoff point, but I list it because it is a high score that I will disqualify based on the user’s cheating on Tropical Island.)

Now we get to a possibly more subjective evaluation. There are some players whose scores are suspiscous because they are, in my evaluation, far too close to the estimates of the full-tank scores. One person stands out here: the player with the Game Center name “Mostafa Hatim.” His scores are essentially exactly the same as my estimates for the scores one would get if one managed to play a level without using any water at all.

Some other players have scores that are farther away from the full-tank scores, but which still seem, in my opionion as someone who has worked very hard to optimize scores, to be completely unattainable. The amount of water they would have to have used is perhaps enough to put out the first couple of fires on a level, but nowhere near enough to put out all the fires.

And finally, there is the player with the Game Center name “agrinio lancer.” They register a score of exactly 100,000 points on each island. This would be amazingly difficult to achieve by regular playing, because it’s essentially impossible to calibrate ones water usage to get such a round number. Plus, they are not listed in the global high score leaderboard with a score of 500,000, which they would be if the scores had been honestly attained.

So, finally, after removing the above players from the leaderboards, here is what is left, showing all players with a score above 475,000:

To close this out for now: Yes, I know that I have been obsessively playing a 2013 iPad game for kids. And that for all I know, “!(tommo)!” and “? ? ? ? 317” and “Ana981 60” and “Marilee Linnas” last played this game in 2015, when perhaps they were 10 years old. But those are the players on the leaderboards, and they have given me benchmarks to work with. And, sometimes young people are scary good at these iPad games…

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