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Moving Villagers In: Need Help

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Ok so I finally got back into New Leaf again, after a two month hiatus. Everything stayed the same, except for some overgrown bamboo and weeds that I have already taken care of. My town has been coming along nicely over the course of a year or so...and now I am on to my next big hurdle.

I want to scan some amiibo cards in and move out terribly placed villagers. I just don't want to mess this up, so any tips or help would be appreciated. I know I can scan amiibos in and move out any villager that I want to. Alice will defintely be the first, as she plotted in a pretty bad spot where I'm trying to do a house theme.

I searched online for tutorials and even watched some videos on it, but every author's explanation is a little different and I don't really know what is true and what isn't. I know that the houses need a 3x3 spot and to add patterns over ground that you don't want any villager plotting into.

I'm curious as to how much space is needed between a house and objects...say like a rock, public project, or in my case another villager's house. I want to place a bunch of homes closely together to get some semblance of a community rather then some crazy wilynily thing. They're also going to be close by a river, so I don't know if that will be a big problem or if different obstructions have different spatial limits.

Also some of the tutorials I read and or watched didn't say anything about additional space for the door. So any advice would be appreciated, thanks!
 
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I'm not an expert, so this isn't going to be comprehensive. Here are some tips from my own experience/research:

- Villagers won't move onto patterns unless they can't move into any open, unpatterned space for some reason. Use that to your advantage. If they're moving onto your patterns, it means the open space won't work for some reason.
- Amiibo card move-ins will often try to stay in/near the space of the villager they're kicking out. All you can do about this is plot reset. Sometimes it takes a lot of patience, but they will eventually move.
- PWPs all have their own buffer zone guidelines, depending on how large they are. I don't fully understand them myself. I suggest looking for a guide specifically about this. There's even a difference between whether a villager can move next to a PWP and whether you'd be able to build that same PWP, in the same place, next to the villager. (PWP-building space requirements are stricter than villager move-in space requirements, it seems.)
- Just think of the extra space in front the door as part of the building. So a villager house is, for placement purposes, more like 3x4. That 3x4 shape only needs one space around it, so it can be one space away from a rock, the cliff, the edge of the map, or the river.
- Villager houses must have two spaces in between them. Buffer zones cannot overlap. The most they can do is touch. This goes for PWPs with large buffer zones as well—the game has some weird rules about buffer zones not overlapping that can make it a nightmare to place big PWPs even when there appears to be a ton of space.
- I'm working on checking this out for myself, but it seems to be confirmed within the community: every 16x16 section of land in your town is an "acre." There can be no more than three villager homes per acre. The game seems to measure this by locating the center of the house, so that'd be the middle square in the 3x3 plot a house makes. I believe you can have parts of more than three buildings in one acre as long as only three "centers" are present per acre. See this old post: http://www.belltreeforums.com/showthread.php?310996-The-precision-of-villager-plot-resetting
 
Thank you so much for the reply and tips! I'm not an expert either, as I rarely tried to plan any villagers house. I destroyed all the pwps near the area where I want three houses close together. So there shouldn't be any problems here.

I think I need to get a screenshot onto here somehow. Because I have enough room, but the other two villagers just don't want to plot near one of the villagers homes that was already there. And it doesn't make sense, because that villager had even less room to work with than what I am giving them...

I also blocked off paths everywhere else except for that big spot and where Alice was. They would just plot everywhere, but there and destroyed paths, flowers, trees, you name it. So I had to just keep plot resetting until they decided to plot right back where Alice was. A lot of work and stress for nothing lol...
 
Ok, so I now finally got around to figuring out a way to get my 3DS images onto the internet and this forum. That took longer than I hoped it would...anyway, for some reason the villagers who move in do not want to go into the area that I set aside for them.

There's definitely enough space. I took into consideration the extra space each building needs. You can see so in the pictures where the white pattern tiles are placed down. There's a spot for the door, it's 3x3, and I added extra space for the phantom space that each needs for itself.

As shown in the picture below, I have made all the calculations needed for the paths and there's already an existing house there. So being too close to the river shouldn't be an issue. As this villager plotted without any problem and they're even closer than the other movers will/would be. I also uploaded a map of my town, which is still a wip as far as villager placement goes. Baby steps though.

I drew a line where I want two villagers to go. Yet they keep plotting near the pond/Retail area. They just keep going into that spot where the mover left. And when they don't plot there, they just put it in some random and horrible place where it destroys areas that would take too much time to fix.

Plots2.jpg


Map - Copy.jpg

Would anyone be able to give me any insight on this. Thanks for any responses and your time.
 
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I read that someone once plot reset 72 times to get an amiibo villager in a spot different than the animal they kicked out before. There were only two spaces not patterned in the whole town, and 71 times they went into the previous space, and on the 72th time they went on the second space.
So, be patient and try a lot? x)
 
Wow that's quite a number lol. I'll definitely keep at it. The thing is that they don't always go back to the spot where the one villager moved out from. Sometimes they'll plot somewhere else where I have paths already down. So they destroy the paths, flowers, bushes, and whatever else can be removed.

So I'm not having a problem with them plotting in that same spot the entire time, although they did it quite often. I just don't get why they would decide to plot in a full path section, when they don't go to the old spot, and when I have a open space that can fit two more villagers at the very least.

Thank you though! I will keep at it. Just not tonight, I'm getting too tired for that lol.
 
Seeing your map, I thiiiiink that maybe the reason they're not plotting there is the acre rule? With the police station, character house and the other villager (I think it's Frita's house? I have her too and it looks very similar >v<) that makes three buildings. So maybe find another spot farther, outside of the 16 tile space in the acre and clear the pattern from it?
If they're plotting on patterns that may mean the space isn't eligible. :(
 
The leftmost part of the blue line you drew might be too close to the bridge. I don't know the exact rules for bridges, but I know they require a lot of space on either side. I might be wrong, but that's my best guess about that part! As for the picture you posted . . .

Hmm. Seems like you might need to move one space to the left? The only thing I can think of is that sometimes the game doesn't count land tiles as complete tiles if the square is cut off a little bit by the cliff or river. So starting from the extra doorway space you left, the tile one square down and two squares to the right might not be counted by the game. That doesn't seem terribly likely to me, but without seeing the whole map, I'm not sure why else it wouldn't be working. The acre rule I mentioned earlier might also be coming back to bite you. I'm sorry things are being such a pain!
 
Thanks for the help guys! I haven't actually tried anything else out, since last night or the night before? I ended up just settling for the villager plotting where Alice was, because everywhere else they wanted to go just messed up things too much lol.

I checked out that thread you showed me Sheando and they had a map with acre rules to it. I ended up pasting that over my map and adding the lines. I don't know how accurate that map is. If it is pretty accurate, villagers can plot in more than one acre? Like my one villager at the left bottom of the bridge is taking up four acres lol...not cool.

I also think you might be right Caramel, because if that map I went by is accurate, the river and the land it cuts into is all one acre. But it might not all that accurate, because it shows that I have two villagers, one human, and a police station all in that same acre. I thought it stated only three buildings can be in there.

I don't know...would it help if I just removed the tile pattern placement? You mentioned that movers see that as blocked correct? I also might try to fit a villager into the left of the Roost. That way I have a backup in case things keep going sour. It's not ideal, because I'll have to remove another pwp, but I'll cross the bridge of replacing my pwps after this project.

Thanks for the help guys! You're all great. And you're right, that's Frita. Pretty good observations. I'd never be able to figure out who is who solely on the appearance of their exterior.
 
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You mention that "villagers can plot in more than one acre." That's not technically true . . I tried to explain it earlier, but it's complicated and weird, sorry! What seems to be the case, according to the original post, is that only the center tile—the very middle of the 3x3 house plot—counts in terms of determining how many villagers are in an acre. So your villager that's in a whopping 4 acres is actually only being counted in one acre: the acre with the center tile in it.

The "only 3 major buildings per acre" rule only applies when the game is generating a new villager plot. It's still possible to build a new character's house or a permanent PWP like The Roost or the police station in an acre with three houses, as long as you still follow the spacing rules. That's what the original poster did. So you must have built a building after the villagers were already present.

I'm not sure what you mean by asking if it would help to remove the patterns. The 3x3 villager house plot will only randomly spawn in an area with no patterns, unless all of the no-pattern areas won't work for some reason. (You don't technically even need to leave that extra space for the door; that space only exists once the house itself has been set up.) So the picture you posted earlier is perfect, in terms of plotting villager placement.
 
Thanks for the help guys! You're all great. And you're right, that's Frita. Pretty good observations. I'd never be able to figure out who is who solely on the appearance of their exterior.

Hehe! I've been looking at this particular house everyday for months... it couldn't be helped. x)
 
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