The manufacture of nuclei on the island of stability proves to be very difficult because the nuclei available as starting materials do not deliver the necessary sum of neutrons. Radioactive ion beams (such as S) in combination with actinide targets (such as Cm) may allow the production of more neutron rich nuclei nearer to the center of the island of stability, though such beams are not currently available in the required intensities to conduct such experiments. Several heavier isotopes such as Cm and Es may still be usable as targets, allowing the production of isotopes with one or two more neutrons than known isotopes, though the production of several milligrams of these rare isotopes to create a target is difficult. It may also be possible to probe alternative reaction channels in the same Ca-induced fusion-evaporation reactions that populate the most neutron-rich known isotopes, namely those at a lower excitation energy (resulting in fewer neutrons being emitted during de-excitation), or those involving evaporation of charged particles (pxn, evaporating a proton and several neutrons, or αxn, evaporating an alpha particle and several neutrons). This may allow the synthesis of neutron-enriched isotopes of elements 111–117. Although the predicted cross sections are on the order of 1–900 fb, smaller than when only neutrons are evaporated (xn channels), it may still be possible to generate otherwise unreachable isotopes of superheavy elements in these reactions. Some of these heavier isotopes (such as Mc, Fl, and Nh) may also undergo electron capture (converting a proton into a neutron) in addition to alpha decay with relatively long half-lives, decaying to nuclei such as Cn that are predicted to lie near the center of the island of stability. However, this remains largely hypothetical as no superheavy nuclei near the beta-stability line have yet been synthesized and predictions of their properties vary considerably across different models.
The process of slow neutron capture used to produce nuclides as heavy as Fm is blocked by short-lived isotopes of fermium that undergo spontaneous fission (for example, Fm has a half-life of 370 µs); this is known as the "fermium gap" and prevents the synthesis of heavier elements in such a reaction. It might be possible to bypass this gap, as well as another predicted region of instability around A = 275 and Z = 104–108, in a series of controlled nuclear explosions with a higher neutron flux (about a thousand times greater than fluxes in existing reactors) that mimics the astrophysical r-process. First proposed in 1972 by Meldner, such a reaction might enable the production of macroscopic quantities of superheavy elements within the island of stability; the role of fission in intermediate superheavy nuclides is highly uncertain, and may strongly influence the yield of such a reaction.
It may also be possible to generate isotopes in the island of stability such as Fl in multi-nucleon transfer reactions in low-energy collisions of actinide nuclei (such as U and Cm). This inverse quasifission (partial fusion followed by fission, with a shift away from mass equilibrium that results in more asymmetric products) mechanism may provide a path to the island of stability if shell effects around Z = 114 are sufficiently strong, though lighter elements such as nobelium and seaborgium (Z = 102–106) are predicted to have higher yields. Preliminary studies of the U + U and U + Cm transfer reactions have failed to produce elements heavier than mendelevium (Z = 101), though the increased yield in the latter reaction suggests that the use of even heavier targets such as Es (if available) may enable production of superheavy elements. This result is supported by a later calculation suggesting that the yield of superheavy nuclides (with Z ≤ 109) will likely be higher in transfer reactions using heavier targets. A 2018 study of the U + Th reaction at the Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute by Sara Wuenschel et al. found several unknown alpha decays that may possibly be attributed to new, neutron-rich isotopes of superheavy elements with 104 < Z < 116, though further research is required to unambiguously determine the atomic number of the products. This result strongly suggests that shell effects have a significant influence on cross sections, and that the island of stability could possibly be reached in future experiments with transfer reactions.