ACNH Best Terraforming Ideas 2022: Top 10 Cliff Terraform Ideas & Tips in Animal Crossing New Horizons

In Animal Crossing New Horizons, terraforming gives the player so much freedom and really can let you customize your island so it can look absolutely different than everyone else's. Here we go over the top 10 best ACNH terraforming ideas and tips that hopefully can help you build unique islands obviously.

Top 10 Best Cliff Terraforming Ideas in Animal Crossing New Horizons

Everyone has their own ways that they like to decorate their island, so we can't promise these will work for all of you, but we are hoping it can at least inspire a little bit to maybe help you get out there and start terraforming because there's not really much else to do right now on Animal Crossing New Horizons, so might as well go out there and make our islands look beautiful with some great terraforming ideas!

1. Water Features

Make the edges of cliffs look a little bit more interesting, maybe to connect them with large bodies of water or just make a cool little water feature. So basically what this is is creating a little circle using the water feature and it's kind of got a little bush on edge. This is a really good way to make the edges of your cliffs look a little bit less boring and plain. Of course, you can just curve your cliff edges, so it's just the cliff but adding the little waterfall to it the little kind of stream in a way, build the bush just to make it feel a bit more natural and complete, you can even put items on there instead of the bush if you want to.

If you have a large body of water on your island, you can use this little bit of the cliff and the waterfall to kind of connect to that, you can follow that water that's coming out of the cliff along to a bigger body of water which is a pretty good terraforming idea. So it's always nice to have water features around your island; quite a few on this list will involve different forms of water features.

2. Mini Islands

If you have a big body of water on your island, building mini islands on the water is a great terraforming idea. You can't go wrong with little tiny islands, it's pretty cute to have the little tiny ones with like maybe a bush or like a little duck on it.

There's a lot you can do lots of different things you can put on the mini islands, little waterfalls maybe just simple cliff structures maybe you just want to put like a single pillar in the water or little pot on top of the pillar, so many ideas you can utilize here to make your terraforming more creative. 

3. Coves

Coves are basically these cramped little areas that are surrounded by cliffs, it's just a nice little resting point where maybe you're walking from one path to another and you've just got this little nice tucked away spot. It's good scenery and you can complement it with lots of different things.

4. Map Designs & Other Illusion Designs

Terraform a cliff into a special shape such as an animal workout, or you can write your name and other text like "Hello" on the top of the cliff. 

Or you can use some custom patterns to generate some creative illusions. For example, create a thin little cliff (doesn't matter how long), place the log custom designs, it's really great for connecting to two-tiered cliffs or the 3 tiered cliffs, and this would be really cool next to like a tree house or a villager home.

5. Hopping Cliffs

Basically, you're going to need 2-tiered cliffs or 3-tiered ones, just add these little jumping areas and then you can put custom designs on it to make it look a bit spicier and you can hop on them. 

6. Fake Bridge 

If you have a city island, you can build up a fake bridge on a cliff with Iron-and-stone Fence and a stone path for a more urban look, obviously, you can use a dirt path or something and use the country fencing to make it look more rural. This fake bridge looks really good leading up to like a house that could be like a palace or the museum or something really grand, or you could have some forced perspective on the side or it could be looking out on like a big flower field or something like that.

7. Forced Perspective

You are going to have a little cliff and place down a road to make it more urban (this is kind of optional), and then you're going to either want to use dollhouses beehives or dog houses to pretend that they're actual homes. You can decorate it with like flowers,  little trees, and shrubs, and custom designs.

8. Cave

This is using the Mario floating block items. You're going to want to have like a space enclosed by cliffs with like some dirt underneath, and you're just going to want to place the floating blocks above it, and then after you do that you can decorate it. Place campfire, log, and other stuff to make it look like someone's kind of living in the cave. On the top of the cliff and around the cave, ease it down a bunch of shrubs flowers, and custom designs to spice it up. Depending on what flowers you use and how you decorate it, you can make it to fit your island theme. 

9. Volcano

Terraforming cliffs into volcanoes is a great build idea for tropical islands, rainforest jungle islands, desert islands, or abandoned islands. Basically how you do it is you're going to need a  kiki torch or something with like fire, and surround it with some clips, then use volcano custom designs to make the cliffs into the volcano Illusion. To make the volcano more natural, curve the cliff edges. 

10. Hidden Pipe, Maze, or Other Game Zone

This one's a bit more simple, you basically want to grab a pipe and cover it up with the cliff, you can only use like one cliff level but what you can do is surround it with even more cliffs almost like a sunken waterfall. You also can simply decorate it with some flowers and shrubs. 

The maze can be really fun with friends or like for your villagers or something like to play a game with them and we've seen people turn their entire island using both um the waterscape and cliff-making tool.

Top 10 Tips To Terraform Better and Faster in Animal Crossing New Horizons

Here we tell you all some tips both to make your terraforming look better and to help you do it faster:

1. Build Two Rows of Cliffs

Literally just building two rows of cliffs instead of going in one row. Here is a much faster way to build up your cliffs where you don't have to move as much to get them done and therefore it takes less time.  If you turn as you are terraforming, you build up two rows of cliff tiles in, so much less time because you're not moving every single time you do a tile, you are staying in one place and doing two at a time.

2. Skip a Row When Tearing Down Cliffs

Another thing to really help you not just build your cliffs up faster but also get rid of them (tearing down your cliffs) is to go in between in rows instead of going one at a time like this where you end up having to hit each block twice (a lot of you have probably already figured this out). But if you hit every other row and create you know like these individual rows of tiles, it is so much faster completely cutting down your clips no, matter how big the clip is this can apply.

3. Use Pathing To Outline Future Building Placements

To outline building placements with this pathway, it doesn't have to be the brick pathway, just custom pathing any path that you're not using in the build, so they don't get mixed up with one another. Use it to outline where you're going to place a building anything large so that you can keep track of that while you're terraforming, this helps us a ton because it prevents us from having to go back and re-terraform things, we can visualize exactly the dimensions of the building and where we are going to place the building. It keeps you from having to destroy and rebuild, as you try to figure out the best place to put your building. So it also helps you save costs because you're not going to be spending extra bells having to move the building again and again to fix it.

4. Draw Out Your Plan or Ideas

This tip makes terraforming super easy for you when you need it to is planning ahead by actually visualizing the area is drawing it. It also will save your time because you are not doing trial and error on the island itself. It also helps if you have an idea and you don't have time to actually make it in the game, draw it so you don't forget what the terraforming shapes look like and you'll have it to come back to later.

5. Make The Cliff Curve

The next tip is to help your terraforming seem a little bit more natural, so because of the way our tools work it might be really tempting to make straight lines with your terraforming. They can definitely look good and more structured builds or urban areas where it's plausible that you would have. For example, a completely straight pond or lake, etc, or completely straight walkways and things like that don't look very natural to the island, so it curves quite a bit by utilizing those half tiles for water is going to be essential, for cliffs too. It just looks way less rigid and man-made if you do go about it this way: curving your terraforming this fits for most themes we'd say from tropicore to cottage core to whatever theme your island is now, it just works a lot better.

6. Layer Your Cliffs For Better Waterfalls

In a similar vein, stagger your cliffs, especially around waterfalls. Don't just make your waterfalls straight lines that lead into straight lines, that's another thing that doesn't seem very natural, because real waterfalls don't really do that. So just create some curvature with your waterfalls whether it's the cliffs or the water itself, and your waterfalls will look a whole lot better on your island.

7. Place Buildings and Flowers on The Beach

Use your beaches for storage, and place some flowers, plants, and builds on there. There is so much empty space called the beaches on your map, if you typically decorate your beaches first then apply this to whatever area on your island that you decorate last, put as many buildings and flowers or even items there as you can if your storage is full use the beach if you want buildings out of the way while you terraform use the beach. This is especially helpful when you're first moving in villagers and things to just go ahead and place their house on the beach, to begin with you're not wasting a lot of extra bells having to move it.

8. Keep a Storage Shed, Trash Can, or Workbench in Your Pockets

This tip is definitely going to help you keep your terraforming and island designing quick, you need to carry three things in your pockets at all times:

1) The wooden storage shed or just the storage shed, you get these after you fully upgrade your home and buy the first 500, 000 bell storage upgrade that is when you get this item you get access to it at the Nook Stop. And it is a lifesaver, you can carry it around place it wherever and you can access your entire inventory right there, it's also faster to put things away because you can select multiple at once. 

2) In addition to having everything right where you need it to be super fast, also carry a garbage can, you are going to want to throw things away as you're designing whether you're decorating or terraforming, and have to dig out flowers and things, it's so easy to just chuck things as you don't need them anymore the same goes for tree branches and other materials that you might have a surplus of, as you are collecting while tearing things down and building.

3) DIY Table, this just helps because if you need anything on the fly you don't have to worry about buying it or finding a way to get it, you can just automatically get your resources from the storage shed and build it here, this is good for if you're terraforming an area that's going to become inaccessible and you need to decorate it on the spot.

9. Literally Just Terraform Over Weeds

If you have so many weeds, stop picking them up while you're terraforming, you can literally terraform right over any weeds that you have on your island, and the weed just disappears, you don't have to worry about throwing it away, selling it and putting it in your storage along with the 400,000 other weeds that you have. The only way it doesn't work is with pathing, you cannot path over weeds and you do have to pick them up, but a cool thing is that you can however demolish a cliff and get rid of the weeds that are on top of it, so whether there's a hole in your cliff or a weed there, you can go ahead and demolish it without having to pick that up or kick over the hole.

10. Don't Obscure Big Areas with Too Many Cliffs

To pay attention to where you are building your cliffs, make sure you don't build your cliffs in front of an area that you want to be visible, you are going to obscure other builds if you do that. Make sure the area behind your cliff needs to be somewhere that people aren't really supposed to, actually go immediately behind there, just give it a few tiles so that everything you build is still visible.