Anyone else not fond of terraforming their island?

[Nostalgicdreamerqueen]

I do like the look of it but not overly done. I would like it more if I could do it better I struggle so bad I love some of it but I wouldn’t want cliffs all over my island

 

[TheSillyPuppy]

It's a love/hate relationship. I'm not the greatest at visualizing in 3-D. So even by using the Happy Island Designer, I try implementing my plan on my island, only to find out it looks pretty crappy in the game. XD From there, I experiment in-game until I'm happy with what I see--if I'm really unsure, I ask a friend who has a better eye for design for feedback. It can be a bit tedious, but I do eventually enter a flow state, which feels pretty rewarding.

 

[Sharksheep]

I kinda wished I kept some of my cliffs so I at least know when game generated cliffs looked like. I guess I can just take someone's initial map to map out the cliffs or at least some of the edges. Same with my rivers but I wanted to mostly have 1 level of cliffs due to the restrictions on ramps.

 

[Licorice]

I’ve barely done any terraforming. I just don’t like too much of it. It starts to get hard to navigate.

 

[seulty]

i’ve never touched terraforming (except for paths!!!) bc of the fact that i get overwhelmed easily with so many possibilities lol - i think it’s fun to just work with what you’ve got and what you can do with a natural layout imo

 

[Snowifer]

I terraformed my island, but I kept most of it natural looking and didn't change too much of it. It's largely the same idea as it originally was. I do have some areas I heavily changed since it's not supposed to look natural at all.

 

[charmingpeach]

I'm not entirely fond of terraforming, I think it is the most overwhelming part of the game and I would prefer if it were easier to use. It is not too user friendly and you can easily make a disaster if you're not careful and don't have an eye for design. Overall this game trains your imaginative muscles to the limit, but that's not necessarily a good thing, I'm mostly terraforming my island out of an inner pressure in a way to keep my island looking as best as it could, but would I be happy without it? Totally

 

[John Wick]

I can't stand it.
It looks ugly and unnatural, IMO.

I've done it, but not gone overboard.

 

[Serabee]

I've done terraforming, but I'm very careful and still keep as much of a natural feel as possible. The basic layout of my island is pretty much the same as when I got it- cliffs are in mostly the same place, same with rivers. I liked the layout of my island so it was easy for me to keep (I made sure I knew exactly where important things would go when I chose it).

BUT. I like terraforming because it lets me clean up corners and make little tweaks and stuff. Like, if I need an extra square of space, I can just move the river over a smidge. Or I can make sure the corners of the cliff line up nicely. Or I can even make it look MORE natural by smoothing parts. In general I haven't done a ton, though.

That being said, while it's not for me, I do admire some of the highly terraformed island I've seen! They're not for me but I've still seen some gorgeous ones. Part of the beauty of this game is that you can play it however you like and there's no wrong way

 

[Saga]

I only did one major bout of terraforming, right when I unlocked it. I had a huge chunk of the southern part of the island raised up, but that cliff wasn't connected to the northern cliffs, so it looked incredibly out of place and blocked the view of the central part of my island. So I leveled the whole thing and got rid of the part of the river that was there, so I could have a completely flat southern half of the island, with lots of room for houses.

Since then, I've hardly terraformed anything. I expanded or shrunk my cliffs by a couple squares here and there, created a few small single-level waterfalls, and added some stepping stones so I could hop across part of the river, but that's about it.

My river shape and remaining cliffs are almost entirely the same as they were at the beginning of the game, because I think they already looked really nice. I was afraid that if I terraformed them, they would end up looking unnatural.

 

[Venn]

I really enjoyed terraforming but I was really nervous at first since things like this, I usually mess up somehow. What I did instead, was take a screen shot of my map and then draw over it of what I wanted to go where and tried a few different things. Once I settled on something I liked, I started terraforming and used my drawn map as a 1:1 reference (On maps). It came out like 95% accurate to what I wanted, and did some changes. None that its done, I pretty much ignore terraforming.

 

[Myrtle Jane]

I pretty much only terraform to get the placement of my ramps just so.

 

[AlyssaAC]

Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts! The biggest reason I don't like it, is because it doesn't feel like Animal Crossing to me taking everything and changing it so much. I don't like the idea of changing my starting island at all. I guess I'm just so used to the older Animal Crossing games where whatever map you got was the map you had to keep and the only thing that was changeable was the plants. That's what I would like to do with my new island. Just basically no terraforming, other than doing paths, paths I will consider. So I'm gonna go natural all the way. I just much prefer it that way.

 

[Xara]

i haven’t done any terraforming besides widening rivers and spontaneously terraforming waterfalls but those weren’t permanent aha. i wish i could be more involved with terraforming but that’s not something i’m good at and i wouldn’t even know what i’d want to do lmao which is disappointing because terraforming really can make some pretty sights but it’s just too overwhelming for me aha