Far away from the heaviest known nuclei, an island of relatively stable nuclei should exist in the nuclear chart. Reaching that island of stability requires a nuclear reaction that will transfer a large number of nucleons from one nucleus to another, such as in the collision of two actinide nuclei, which are heavy and already neutron-rich. In one particular collision scenario, ternary quasifission, the composite system formed by the two colliding nuclei is not in equilibrium, splitting into three fragments, instead of the more commonly observed binary fission process. The authors report a systematic study of ternary quasifission in U + U collisions in a microscopic framework that has been successfully applied to various nuclear phenomena. They find that including octupole deformation has a pronounced effect on the formation of the middle fragment. For tail-to-tail and tail-to-side collisions, the model calculations predict the formation of very heavy neutron-rich systems in certain energy intervals, a result that is potentially interesting for the synthesis of superheavy elements.