5 Animal Crossing New Horizons Island Design Ideas - How to Design Animal Crossing Island

Animal Crossing allows players to be creative in the game, your island is completely up to you, no matter what you want it to look like, start to terraform it with various tools and items. If you are looking for more Animal Crossing island designs in New Horizons, we put 5 ideas here to help you transform the empty spots on your island. 

How Do You Make Island Look Good?

There are some people's advice from Reddit:

- The biggest issue with people who have a more 'plain' looking island is easily a lack of trees. If you don't want to wait for them to grow, go on a boat or plane tour and dig up full grown trees there. You can also stop a tree from growing if you don't want it to be a full grown tree. Plant a tree sapling - wait until it is at your desired height - plant a piece of fruit (not coconut) directly behind it. This prevents the tree from growing any more. The fruit tree will also not grow.

Creating varying heights adds dimensions. 

Terraforming rivers/ponds-->weeds--->flowers/bushes--->objects(fences, tables, chairs, fountains, etc)---->trees/houses--->terraforming mountains/waterfalls

If you can get a little bit of most of these heights in one picture you've likely done a good job adding depth.

- It's better to pick an aesthetic over a color theme for your island. An aesthetic gives you more wiggle room to be creative where a color theme is more limiting and can make an entire island a bit redundant. Color themes are better suited to room/home designs. For instance; A pink themed island means that most things will get lost in the sea of pink. If everything is pink, nothing stands out.

- A pink-themed room is better but picking at least 2-3 colors to 'theme' an area can help make things look cohesive without looking one dimensional. Baby pink, teal and ivory is better than 3-4 different flavors of pink.

Note:

A lot of people use custom designs and pathways, but that's not necessary to create a nice looking island. Unless you create your own or stick to one designer, it can be difficult to find custom designs that work well together.

The other issue is flow. Unless you are going for an opulent or city aesthetic, avoid 'gridding' out your island. Paths that twist and turn and are varying lengths and thicknesses is more interesting than a 2 block path that turns your island into graph paper.

5 Animal Crossing New Horizons Island Ideas - ACNH Island Design Tips

1. Basketball Court

This Animal Crossing island idea is just using some custom paths that mark out the necessary signs for the basketball games. You can buy two basketball hoops from Nook's cranny and use them to create the necessary setup for the court. If you do not have much room, you can go around and find a corner to put the item into without having to drastically remodel everything. Another thing you need to do is to lay down the wooden planks or something else looks like the flooring you could play basketball on, it is one of the pre-existing pathways because you would put custom Animal Crossing items on top of it. Then lay down the lines all the way around you, find the center point and put the circle in the middle, then put down your two hoops now again. Finally, add some spectator chairs and a basketball there to complete the look basically.

2. Fake Bridge

Before creating the custom bridge design, you need to know how many you already have in your island, may be you have reached the limit. You essentially go and do is to dig out the land and use different elevations and down below, put the water in and fill in the gap with the terraforming tool, you can then lay down some custom pathways as a fence on the top to create a nice bridge. If you want to do a stone bridge, you could do something similar and put fences in either side. If you have enough space, you can extend the bridge, when you’ve got enough depth and distance, you can actually get nice effect where you can see river on either side. 

3. Fossil Dig Site

The third Animal Crossing island design is for paleontologists. If you want to have a fossil dig site, you need to hollow out some land and work with elevation. You can just do one layer and go two layers deep. Begin with some kind of square, you can through sand or earth down, once you built up the land around to create the dig site, throw down some rope fences around to make it look like roped off the area, so people can't get there, that is this cool fossil design. Lay six different tiles down and then using the nice perspective of the sort of Animal Crossing camera when you stand up higher. You can also add some items like spade on display and a ladder down to add the overall look.

4. Island Park

Build an island on your island is also a distinct idea for Animal Crossing! Surround a circle of water around a decent land and turn it into a beautiful scenic park. Add a bunch of pebbled floors, a water fountain, some seats, and fill them with trees and flowers. You can even take a step forward and turn your entire island into a bunch of interconnected islands. However, if most of the island is water, you may encounter some difficulties.

5. City Streets

You can also create a series of urban landscape and buildings. From the street market to the prosperous city, Animal Crossing players have developed some wild industrial areas. A lot of things come down to making everything look super busy, but it helps servers glow in the dark and look like tall buildings at night. Probably one of the most common islands for players, you can find many roads, unique signs and cool stall designs here.

Check out the video from Arekkz Gaming to figure out how to design the Animal Crossing island: