Islands surrounding continents

[TheNerdyFunnyComedian]

The types of islands we're interested in (for our purposes):

• Continental/tidal islands (islands close to a continent and often separated by shallow water, random shapes/sizes)
• Barrier islands (oblong, hug the shore. often create an outline of the coast but divided by a lagoon. openings between barrier islands and the ocean are random (or could be programmed as so) as barrier islands can be short or very very long)
• Volcanic islands (for our purposes, islands with a volcanic biome surrounded by vegetation. may be close or far from a continent, but spawn in lines of random length, with singular volcanic islands also being a possibility)
• Coral islands (for our purposes let's focus on atolls, a striking island that is a ring of sand and trees with a lake inside, look it up)

Even though usually caused by glacial patterns, it would be nice for every other river to have an island or two in a river delta pattern, (Manhattan being the islands that comes to mind) as well as smaller and more oblong islands (albeit rare) upstream rivers.

Implementation/Discussion

One solution could be to generate islands as fractally generated continents, like the Mandelbrot set or a snowflake; however, this could present issues with generation and (probably) more importantly realism. My suggestion would be to have a 50/50 spread of coasts with barrier islands and those without (those without are more likely to be cliffs or steep beaches) and then generate barrier islands in a way that mimics the existing coastline, with a variable lagoon width and random points of entrance to the ocean. The number one rule with barrier islands is to ensure the coast-facing side is as smooth as possible. In other words, my suggestion would not to generate barrier islands individually, but as a whole, and then create holes in the islands procedurally.

This feature request isn't necessarily asking for all of the above (of all the above the one that I believe would make the most impact would be barrier islands), I wanted to create a simple list for what islands in Minecraft could look like. Cheers!

Edit: grammars