How to plan your island in Animal Crossing New Horizons

Animal Crossing: New Horizons allows you to plan out your island which is an important part of the process if you want your island to be perfect. Here’s how you can best prepare your island paradise to find a warm aesthetic using the ACNH Island Planner.

A standout feature in Animal Crossing New Horizons is terraforming, which empowers players to tailor their island to their liking. However, for those new to the game, mastering this tool can be a formidable task.

Luckily, there’s an Animal Crossing Island layout planner tool that will make the whole process 10 times easier and means you won’t be designing and then demolishing your work over and over again to try and make the perfect layout. Introducing: the Island Planner app – AKA the answer to all your prayers.

Animal Crossing island planner

Developers Rob Fichman and Carmela Diaz are the brains behind the genius idea and have created a 3D application that lets you create your town layout without actually being in the game itself. The tool starts off with a blank canvas of grass that you can build upon using an array of options like building cliffs, carving out rivers, and setting paths.

You can even put the buildings where you’d like them to be, such as the museum and Nook’s Cranny, and can manipulate rivers and cliffs to make waterfalls and multiple levels.

If you’re finding it difficult to place objects, you can enable a square grid to help, and there are several camera angles and zoom levels to give you a better view of how it’s all coming together.

After you’ve made your layout, you can even save it to your computer for easy reference later when it comes to replicating it in your real town.

The tool can still be of great use to players who don’t need much inspiration to design their island. Carving out rivers and cliffs can be a pain to master, especially with all of the diagonals, so you could use it for practice.

Currently, elements including rocks and trees, aren’t available, but the developers are working on it – so stay tuned to the app’s itch.io page for updates.

How to plan your Animal Crossing island?

There are many unique and interesting designs that you can achieve when planning your Animal Crossing island. Whether you want something simple and straightforward, or extravagant and intricate, the first step is finding the right inspiration.

One of the best places to find island inspiration is on the Animal Crossing: New Horizon designs subreddit.

If you’d like more terraforming inspiration, check out our handy guide where we show you some of the best ideas out there for transforming your island.

So that’s everything you need to know about the best way to plan your island layout in Animal Crossing. You can also take a look at how to breed hybrid flowers to grow flowers with eye-popping colors. You can also check out how to restart your island in case you’re not satisfied with your progress.