Animal Crossing New Horizons Island Design Tips & Ideas - Layout, Terraform, Pathway, Entrance Custom Design Guide

If you are building your island in Animal Crossing New Horizons, we're all in the same boat where we're constantly refining and moving things, and just trying to make things as cool as possible. But then when you learn some of the kind of useful tips and tricks, and you unlock things like terraforming, you can start doing some really awesome stuff. So in this Animal Crossing designing guide we want to go over a few handy tips to help you improve your Island designing and building.

Tip 1 - Planning your ACNH island and set up layout

It's one thing to you know just go around and place things as you see fit. But if you have an idea as to what you actually want to do, it's going to make your life a lot easier, allows you to work towards things, and also save you some money, so in the end, you don't necessarily have to pay too much Animal Crossing Bells to start moving things around. There's actually a really useful tool - Happy Island Designer, it's basically a little sort of top-down map which you can then use to layout, like you know where you want things to go, you can layout your villagers and your different shops, you can allow the different landmasses and different elevations. You know obviously you're still ultimately going to need to build this in-game, if you use this to effectively create or recreate what you want your item to look like, it then makes it easier for you personally to start working towards things as you begin building your island.

Tip 2 - Use custom designs to create unique pathways and floor

Create Custom Pathways - Obviously once you get the terraforming stuff and you get the other tools you can start laying down pathways around your village. But if you want to take this, one step further you can start doing things where you can layer custom designs on the floor to add extra detailing where necessary. And you can also use it to create custom pathways such as things like Tomic roads. You can also layer your custom designs over the built in pathways but in order to make them work correctly, you have to take some specific steps. You can do this basically by creating layers of custom designs and then you link these all together, you can basically copy their design move it around different positions. Ideally you want to create the designs so they have elements of transparency on different sides so that if you're using it for something like a pathway you can then place each design the corresponding location to effectively give you the look that you're going for. So using custom designs, layered on top of pathways can give you some really interesting results.

Creating Hop Spots - Another a fun thing you can do and this one is super cool. It's kind of a sort of platformer a fan or the Zelda fan. You can create hop spots which have basically little of one tile landmasses that you can then put across areas like lakes or rivers. And you can use it to jump across organically because when you're in game well larger gaps you need to use your whole vault to actually get over. If it's a small one tile gap and you sprint up to it, you can actually just naturally jump from platform to platform. So you can then use this either just to create quick pathways, which are actually little bit cheaper than having to basically fork out for a big bridge, and you can also use it to create fund at all like minigame areas or hopping areas or just ways to navigate more inventively to different areas on your island. You could even go and be extravagant and create like parkour puzzles and stuff. Creating hop sports is a good way to basically create cheaper free bridges or just means two more inventively explore your island.

Tip 3 - General ACNH design tips and tricks about being slightly more efficient 

Move Trees Instead Of Cutting Down - One of the first things of course is if you want to move trees around instead of having to cut them down and replant them, if you eat a fruit beforehand you, then just pick up your shovel you could dig up a complete tree goes back into your bag.  And you can then go and replace it somewhere else and as soon as you place it the tree then pops back up, it'll release glory if it was carrying fruit it'll still have fruit. So you can basically use this, if you've placed a tree and want to put a house here and then you don't want to necessarily cut it down, you can use it to replace ACNH Items or if you want to suddenly start being like really pedantic and create like a nicely laid out orchard for all your fruit trees, then this is definitely how you want to go.

Using Fencing To Block Off Different Areas - Another thing you can consider doing is actually using fencing as a means to barricade off anything from saying online Island guests. If ever you like to open up your island, maybe you want to let people come into buy turnips or see your shops, but you don't necessarily want them to have complete access to everywhere if you then put down fencing in certain areas you can effectively barricade off different parts of your island and only those of your friends that have best friends daters would actually be able to move the fences. You can cleverly use fencing to block off different areas so that only certain people can go the last one is when you're actually terraforming and using the terraforming option just to kind of a time-saving like an efficiency tip for you. When you're tearing down cliffs to actually make it easier. If you cut them into checkerboard like lines, this actually stops the kind of redundant shovel strike when it actually creates around cliff edge. So you know this is kind of ultimate min maxing but if you're kind of going on like a big landscaping project and want to save some time, then this can help you out.

Tip 4 - Best Design Ideas For Your Entrance

We suggest people start by adding basic decoration to their Town Square and the entrance just outside of the airport, these locations are ideal for a variety of reasons:

1). They are the first thing people will see when they arrive at your Island and a good first impression will set the tone for the rest of their visit this also guarantees that your visitors will see whatever you build here, so it's a great place to show off if that's your thing.

2). These structures can be moved, so there's a very good chance they will remain unchanged even after you unlock the ability to move structures or further down the line terraforming. Another thing to note is that everyone has access to these two areas regardless of how far you've progressed in the game,  making them the most accessible place to start.

3). You will be forced to work around some asymmetry a lack of space and an overall lack of options wait isn't that a negative. On the surface it may seem that way but there's a safe. Restrictions breed creativity and in my experience that is absolutely the case. Decorating downtown is going to be a unique challenge for everyone as it hinges on the location of your Town Hall in relation to your airport, but no layout is bad. 

If your Town Hall is far away think about making a long walkway entrance, Town Hall off to the side well maybe direct your guests to either side with a gorgeous centerpiece. So Town Hall super close to the airport, well you're going to have to get creative with space but isn't that exactly what we want and then again there's always the option to just ignore it altogether. There are absolutely no rules to this, this is your chance to experiment and find your own unique style.