Villager Cycling Help

Okay, I'm very frustrated and hope that someone could help me out here.

I (foolishly) loaded up my character today without plot scouting, despite knowing that someone would likely move in. So when I got into my town, I found that a new villager had wiped out some of my peach trees. I was very irritated, but I figured that it was my own fault and that I could just cycle them out. I also thought that if I could block off every spot with patterns except for the ones that I wanted villagers to go into, I could cycle out all the villagers with undesirable placements and end up with villagers that were random, but all properly placed. House placement was the only thing I was worried about.

So, after enacting the Beautiful Town ordinance, I start using this cycling method. Go back 1 year and five days, go forward 1 year, and then go forward five days. I started when a villager was in boxes, so when I did the third shift, I expected another villager to be in boxes. Nope. Just another normal day, with a second villager that had plotted and moved in on top of my paths and trees. I tried again, only to get a third villager in a wrong spot.

Obviously, I'm very frustrated. Not a single villager has plotted in a desirable spot, and my attempts to fix that have just made the problem worse- not to mention that my town is a mess now and I have nothing to show for it.

This is how much space I'm leaving for villagers:

XXXXX
X***X
X***X
X***X
XX*XX

The Xs are patterns placed on the ground and the stars are the empty space I left for the house. I covered the entire town in patterns so that there was no space to move anywhere except for the spots I left open. I thought that villagers couldn't plot on top of patterns if there was another space available, and my game has followed that so far...so why did these two new villagers plot on top of paths and trees? What am I doing wrong?

Any help would be very appreciated.

The space you are leaving for villagers might be too close to one another or too close to a rock, pwp or building. You need at least two spaces between those for a villager to fit.

So like this to plot two villagers next to each other:

XXXXXXXXXX
X***XX***X
X***XX***X
X***XX***X
XX*XXXX*XX

And two down from the door as well.
It can also be the "three building" rule acnl has, as in only 3 buildings/houses can be in one acre at a time.

This is all from my personal experience with cycling (and I'm far from an expert) but I hope it helps!

I'm already ensuring that every villager has a 5x5 plot of land to themselves, so the buffer zones aren't overlapping. The "three building" rule in ACNL is new to me, though. Where can I find info on that? I didn't think acres were used any more.

NealCruco said:

I'm already ensuring that every villager has a 5x5 plot of land to themselves, so the buffer zones aren't overlapping. The "three building" rule in ACNL is new to me, though. Where can I find info on that? I didn't think acres were used any more.

Click to expand...

Well I thought that was the case but googling it doesn't seem to tell much. All I've found is this: "Every town is divided into 20 acres, five across by four down. An acre contains 16 x 16 = 256 "spots" (places where you can dig a hole or where a flower or tree can grow) on the ground."

There's also this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AnimalCrossing/comments/2t2rgd/how_many_tilesacres_in_a_new_leaf_town/

Honestly I'm not too sure how plotting of houses work, like I said I'm far from an expert at it so I can't really help much beyond this point sorry!

squidpops said:

The space you are leaving for villagers might be too close to one another or too close to a rock, pwp or building. You need at least two spaces between those for a villager to fit.

So like this to plot two villagers next to each other:

XXXXXXXXXX
X***XX***X
X***XX***X
X***XX***X
XX*XXXX*XX

And two down from the door as well.
It can also be the "three building" rule acnl has, as in only 3 buildings/houses can be in one acre at a time.

This is all from my personal experience with cycling (and I'm far from an expert) but I hope it helps!

Click to expand...

I have 4 next to each other via plot resetting. ^_^

Well, thanks to both of you. I think I'll leave my town alone for a few days and come back when my final exams are done with. Then I'll have weeks to figure this stuff out.

(I'll still be around here, though. So if anyone else reading this has advice on what I'm doing wrong, I would love to hear it! Sounds like multiple things may be going wrong...and not knowing is frustrating.)

I know it's frustrating, but hang in there. ^_^