Guide: How to create pretty areas in ACNL without hacking
After I got a very kind ask some time ago I decided to answer this in a longer post.
This guide will be about how to create pretty areas, not about how to create a pretty town (but I think it could be used as basic for this as well).
The reason is that I actually never have a pretty town, I only do a few areas and put a lot of work into those, but I fail at doing a whole town. But I will try my best to describe how I do my town areas.
If you plan on doing an area without cheating you will need one thing the most and that is patience. ACNL is a real time game where everything can be changed by yourself day by day. You will need to farm money to get your pwp’s done, breed flowers, collect bushes and all this takes time.
So after all this is said, let’s start over with a step-by-step description about how to create areas in your town.
The first thing you should think of is what you may need for your area. Collecting those things in advance every day will help you a lot with landscaping.
The basics of course are your tools:
The shovel can be bought at the nookling junction. The can and the axes can be bought at the garden shop.
You should try to check the garden shop every day and buy axes until you get the gold axe because normal axes break very fast and you may probably need to cut down a lot of trees.
The gold axe can be obtained after buying 50 tree saplings at the garden shop and will never break (so you should really try to get that!).
Checking the garden shop every day is essential for landscaping without hacks!
Other items you should collect from there are:
flowers (not as important but still useful)
I really recommend to create a second character that can store those items for you so you don’t need to waste all your closet space for gardening stuff.
For example if you want to collect a certain kind of bushes to plant them all at once when the blooming season for them start you may have a lot of bushes to store for a few months. Having a second character holding those is really useful if you don’t want to mess up your whole town with stuff on the ground because you don’t have enough space.
Other items you can collect in your town:
The easiest way to obtain other fruits than your town fruit is to trade them with other players. Just ask if someone has a certain fruit for you and maybe you can meet up and share fruits with each other. If you’re not able to meet with other players you can also get fruits as a present from villagers in your town (for example sent in letters or as a reward after you helped them ). Also a few fruits can be obtained on the island tours!
You can find more about fruits here.
Mushrooms can be found in November. They will grow in your town and you may want to keep them since they make a nice decoration as well. Another way to get mushrooms is to cut down a tree. Sometimes a rare stumpdesign appears on the leftover stump. If you keep the stump and don’t burry it out mushrooms may grow next to it. This method makes it possible to get a few mushrooms in other months than November as well.
Clovers grow in your town randomly the whole year. You can pull them out and if you’re lucky you can obtain a lucky clover. You will be able to plant the lucky clover again in any place you like in your town. But keep in mind that all clovers which are no lucky clovers will disappear after pulling them out (like weed).
I usually don’t pull clovers out as I like to have a little randomness in my town and just keep them where they showed up unless i don’t want to place something else there.
The reason why I meantioned flowers in the garden shop as not as important is that they also grow in your town (so you can just collect those), you can breed them and you can obtain them from the island tours (especially the flower tours!). Collecting flowers from the island is the fastest and easiest way to get a lot of flowers in my opinion.
It is also possible to breed flowers which you can’t buy in the garden shop, which will never grow in your town without breeding them and can’t be found on the island tours. As breeding is a pretty big theme itself I will just put a few links in here (and honor the work of other people, no I am not lazy), so you can easily look those up by yourself.
General informations about flowers
I really recommend you to start breeding flowers very early as this is something which takes a lot of time (since you can only get a certain amount of breeded flowers a day) and can turn out a little random (like getting a purple tulip instead of a black one...). So if you want to use a certain kind of flowers in an area then be prepared and start breeding them as soon as possible!
Of course you should also make sure to have a few bells on your bank - PWP’s aren’t the cheapest if you want to built a few of them!
The next thing you should do is to look for a spot you want to work on.
And then cut down every tree, take all the flowers and items away and burry out every fossil. Say hi to emptiness!
The reason for doing so is that this will make it a lot easier to plan an area. Also it helps to free your mind from what there has been before and to get an idea what you could also place there.
After this is done the next thing is to plan the ways. I usually just try to connect villager houses and and public objects with each other.
This helps a lot if you have absolutely no idea what to do with an area as you will see how much space there is between the objects.
It doesn’t have to be the final way pattern, it’s just to use something to make it easier for you (for example i switched to natural ways in my town, so no QR’s and still use them to plan my town).
Then think about which PWP’s you may want to place in that area.
It is really, REALLY important to know the sizes of the PWP’s you are going to place because else planning is impossible.
Here is a complete list of all PWP’s and the spaces they need.
At this point you can also plan where you want to have bushes and trees as they also need some space and don’t grow everywhere. While planning you should allways keep in mind that trees will grow bigger later and they may cover things you actually don’t want to be covered. So make sure to leave space behind those if you like to.
Again I really recommend to lay down patterns to make everything easier!
After this is done usually the next thing i go for is to place the PWP to check if I was right with my plans.
Think about which trees and bushes you want to plant next and replace the QR’s with those.
An area can look much more interesting if you add different kinds of trees (means a place with red as the main colour doesn’t have to include only cherries but can look much better with different kinds of red fruits like apples and perfect cherries).
Then start to plant some flowers between the trees and bushes to add more colour! I usually get stuck with doing this for some hours cause I can’t decide which flower combi I like the best.
Now the hardest work is done! During the next days your only job is to watch everything growing and maybe place some more PWP’s if you planned to do so! Enjoy how your area completely changes the look in the next days!
Congrats your new area is now done!
If there’s something you don’t like about it then don’t be afraid to change it again! Animal Crossing gives you great opportunities to completely redo everything again and again until you like it!
I hope this guide helps a few people a little! If you have any questions or didn’t understand something please feel free to send me an ask and I will do my best to answer you!
I will work on another guide which explains more about details and seasonal changes for landscaping in the future.
