How do you plan your towns? PWP's and paths and all that?

[scoobyschnak]

I didn't really think about paths and everything when I made my first town (Nowhere), and it's a mess! I just built my police station in a bad place, which I'm regretting. Villager houses are all over the place! My characters' houses as well. I started laying paths and they intersect weirdly, I can't figure out which trees to chop and which to keep. It's very annoying.

How did you plan your town? Did you have an idea in mind when you started? I just got a second copy, so I'm hoping to make this town a bit better and planned. Are there any online things to plan it out?

Thanks for any responses!

edit: also, how do I get my villagers to suggest more PWPs? They hardly ever do!

 

[lucitine]

I decided to seriously decorate my town when I had 9 villagers moved in and had played for a while. I think I got lucky because a lot of my villagers were in decent locations. I just put down paths starting from the train station. I didn't have a plan at all. Was kind of just like, lets draw a straight line here. I ended up having to go around one villagers house, but that wasn't too bad.

My PWP, I plan around my paths though. I clear out large areas for larger projects or things that I intend to decorate around with leaves and trees.

I've seen a method with the PWP. Swim out to the furthest corner of your ocean and wait for 5 minutes. Then come back on land and see who pings you. Make sure that your pockets are filled with junk though, so your villagers wont ask to buy things.

- - - Post Merge - - -

Also, I just chopped down whatever trees were in the way (basically all of them. I have no normal trees now ._.)

 

[Glitterizer]

First, I made a tile by tile map of my town, marking only the permanent parts: the rocks, Train Station, Town Hall, Plaza, Retail, river, ponds, my three player houses, and the Caf? + Police Station, which I had already built.



Then, I marked my villager houses, but only the one's I know I'll be keeping, and started drawing my paths and bridges on that map, while marking them out on the game by surrounding the path with flowers, since I want a natural dirt/grass deterioration path, the flowers help it stay where I want it). This is when I started cutting down the trees that were in the way, little by little until I got the golden axe. I tried to stay consistent: 1-wide paths only were it lead to a house, 2-paths for the most part, and 3-wide only where I wanted to align it with something (the town tree/main street entrance).



Then, finally, I started planning my trees, shrubs and PWPs. You'll find this guide very useful for figuring out where PWPs will or will not fit: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/6c/4f/32/6c4f322011cc08b71dee833148a23330.jpg
The red tiles are the project's actual size, the yellow is the free space that needs to be around it (where only flowers and items can be placed, no threes, shrubs, other PWPs, not even the PWP's yellow areas can overlap). The blue tile is the one you need to be standing on when talking to Isabelle.



I still don't have all my dreamies, but I think I still have a lot of free space to move them in. I'm not crazy enough to plot reset for a "perfect" location, I just try to place them out of the path I already planned.

 

[X2k5a7y]

I wish I could plan like the majority, but I generally just go with the flow. I like being surprised by what happens.

 

[scoobyschnak]

I decided to seriously decorate my town when I had 9 villagers moved in and had played for a while. I think I got lucky because a lot of my villagers were in decent locations. I just put down paths starting from the train station. I didn't have a plan at all. Was kind of just like, lets draw a straight line here. I ended up having to go around one villagers house, but that wasn't too bad.

My PWP, I plan around my paths though. I clear out large areas for larger projects or things that I intend to decorate around with leaves and trees.

I've seen a method with the PWP. Swim out to the furthest corner of your ocean and wait for 5 minutes. Then come back on land and see who pings you. Make sure that your pockets are filled with junk though, so your villagers wont ask to buy things.

- - - Post Merge - - -

Also, I just chopped down whatever trees were in the way (basically all of them. I have no normal trees now ._.)

Dang! I'm jealous. I got pretty unlucky with my villagers' houses, they're in the most random and inconvenient locations possible.

- - - Post Merge - - -

Ooh, Glitterizer!! I really like this idea, I'm pretty organized... usually. Did you make that map grid yourself? And if so, how did you know how big all the things (ReTail, Tree-area, houses, etc.) were?

 

[CJODell62]

I never plan. I just go with the flow. In my second and third towns, I waited until I had 10 villagers before I really started putting PWP's in.

 

[tybalt_cake]

Just put patterns of where certain PWP'S are going to be

 

[Barbara]

I wish I could plan like the majority, but I generally just go with the flow. I like being surprised by what happens.

You really shouldn't feel bad (if you are) for not planning your town. The majority certainly doesn't plan their town actually, most of them aren't on forums like these though. I'm not sure what kind of planning you precisely mean here, but most people don't plan out every bit of their town, and really there is nothing wrong with that.

 

[Alienfish]

not much lol i just slap pwps in good spots and i never cared much about paths tbh

 

[Barbara]

Also, for OP: I don't think I can give you much more advice after the posts above me, but I did find that it takes 'experience' to plan paths in a nice way. I've had a lot of troubles with it over the past few years (in City Folk it all looked pretty bad xD) but evnetually you'll find out what works best for you. For instance, I wanted diagonal paths at first because it's more accessible and I even found a nice path that looked good diagonally, but in the end I found it more convenient to just have straight paths. It's easier with alignments and will give you leftover places you can do something with, like the rectangles you saw in Glitterizer's pictures.
So don't be afraid to experiment and try some things out, it'll help you decide how you want your paths eventually.

 

[ShenkuuBlossoms]

I created beta tiles (basically patterns of an X, leaf, tree and house) to give me an idea of where to run paths, plant tree groves, and grow shrubs/place flowers.

 

[Shimmer]

I plan my paths based on where the natural grass wear occurs (the ones I can't fix!) and where I normally run around on. As well, I DO NOT bother placing PWPs or paths until I have all of my dreamies to avoid having one move in and ruin my plans. Of course I could always plot reset but ain't nobody got time for that!

 

[chocopug]

I don't really plan. I just put down paths where I think they look nice or where I walk around a lot. I usually have a rough idea of where I want PWPs to go, but I can and do change my mind. Really I just want my town to grow organically like a town would. I want it to look nice of course, but I know if I get too obsessed with planning it out perfectly, the game will stop being fun for me.

 

[Romaki]

I just put PWPs where they look good, and plan on 'blank' (and future clover) spots so that I can freely run around in my town.

 

[NursePhantump]

I literally started with 0 plan and idk I've made it work.

 

[Miii]

I didn't have a plan at all when I started I still kind of don't (2 years later), so I just add things as I see fit, and use paths to decorate certain parts of the town, rather than to create a walkway through the town. Most of my pwps are on the edges of town, out of the way, which I like. I have tons of hybrids which I like to plant around pwps and my villagers' houses And I'm going for a 3 theme town. That's about it for me as far as planning goes xD

 

[cheadle]

This was my first time ever playing an animal crossing game, so I didn't even think about town layout, or choosing a map or anything. My layout is kind of weird in that the river is really snake-y and makes a lot of kind of tight inlets (idk if I'm describing that right but I can maybe put up my map later) where it is difficult to place PWP's. On the other hand, the fact that I didn't have many options when building the cafe and other large PWP's, I can't really have any regrets. So I guess now I'm kind of ok that my town has a weird layout (the town hall is right above the event plaza) and have learned to embrace it and work with it.

I prefer to lay out any paths around my villager's houses and adapt it when they move. I don't know how long I will want to keep all my villagers so I gotta stay flexible. I got rid of my custom design paths though because it was kind of a pain and never looked that good. I have my PWP's wherever I think they would look nice. I'm still working that out, but sometimes when I was waiting to unlock a certain pwp I built one of a similar size in that area so no one would move in on top of it.

I'm not sure if that was very helpful or not, but basically what I'm saying is that it can be fun to work within your town's limits rather than reset for a better layout. My DA is on my profile if you want an idea of what I've been doing with my town. It's an eternal work in progress, and I'm not totally sure where it's going next, but I like how my town grows and evolves as I play.

 

[tae]

i honestly just built as i went. and sooner or later i'd tear down pwps and rebuild them and go from there. haha. i'm gonna start major reconstruction here soon once i get barold settled in my town. so many new ideas for how to landscape and place pwps. i'm excited. i never plan out anything, and i just change what feels / looks weird and so on.

 

[MapleLeafKangaroos]

Honestly, I just go with the flow. That probably explains why my town is a hot mess right now. I suck at pathwork, so I don't really put down paths, plus I don't really get the point of them.
I wish I was better at figuring out where my flowers should go and what colors they could be, because the flowers in my town are all over the place and all different colors. It's really annoying. Also, pwps are a nightmare. Due to my bad planning, aka no planning, it's really hard to find a good spot to put them without disturbing some flowers or running into my poorly placed paths.

 

[rad_baby]

When I first started to path my town I literally cut down EVERY single tree which my villagers did not enjoy. I collected every fruit (from other towns and what not) and path'd before I planted them. Paths are usually step one for me, then bush starts, then trees, and lastly PWP's. It helps me stay organized, I also plot reset for all my villagers to make sure they don't mess an area up.
Before I set out to get my dreamies, I literally drew out an ideal PWP's plan (using a guide/list of every PWP in the game) with paths in the sketch as well. I cycled to get PWP's and collected pretty much all 30 of the ones I wanted within a week. (The trick is excellent if you don't know it, I'd be happy to explain.) After I was done with that, I started cycling out all my unwanted villagers and buying (always sounds weird to say) ones on here, right now I have 7/10 dreamies and 20 PWP's planted, I path around the dreamies houses and put the projects in there designated areas. I also collected tons of bush starts and saplings to plant, and I placed them all around the paths. Atm I'm trying to get my last 3 villagers and also hybrids.