Have you flattened your island before?

[Shellzilla_515]

No, but I did try flooding a third of my island once back in April. It took way longer than I expected to achieve the result before reverting back to the normal layout. Many of my villagers were in the way sitting by the river and fishing. Some probably used the rescue services to get to the plaza surrounded by water.

Spoiler: Images of my flooded island + map

Just ignore Sterling who is snoozing on a toilet out in the open.

There were some patches of land because there was furniture in the way, buildings, flowers, trees, paths I didn't want to destroy, and that I want to retain the default layout of the island when I wanted to go back.

 

[nightglow]

I made this mistake too early on in the game. My rivers now look too boxy and far from natural looking, so I'm in the process right now of redesigning all of my rivers. Before, I patched over my river mouths, which I now regret because as I said it doesn't look very natural. I think I did it because I didn't really like having both river mouths placed in the south, its something I didn't think about when playing from the beginning as I was too excited to just play. With that said, if I were to ever reset I'd look for a different map entirely.

Yes it took forever for me to redo my rivers to where I would be ok with them. When I reset in the future, because it will happen eventually for me, I am going to pay closer attention to how my rivers are and only do small edits to them if at all. But my current island feels more like an experiment to me and getting use to AC in general since it is my very first AC game.

 

[DJStarstryker]

No. I feel like this would hurt my creativity more than help it. Working from an established base and modifying it works best for me. A blank slate feels too intimidating.

Another downside of the flattening thing is how expensive it is with the multiple moves. If you have to move everything to the beach, build stuff, then move it again... That is 2 moves for each building minimum. I had a few buildings I had to move multiple times, but most buildings only had to be moved once.

 

[Lotusblossom]

i need to do this but have been utterly avoiding having to empty my pockets and dig up all the flowers and then i time traveled like a mad man and then had to take a serious serious break.. until i get amiibos... until i get amiibos

 

[moonlights]

no I'd rather just work around what I have and add or remove cliffs as I see fit

 

[sunnibunniva]

I considered it for a bit, but I think I'm just gonna put all my buildings and plants on the cliffs to start the first level from scratch, since that's gonna be a more urban area n needs more exact planning with stuff out of the way. It seems scary to me to flatten everything since I know I want a fairly large cliff area (kinda considering moving the cliffs quite close to the rivers that separate the "tutorial section") and I don't trust myself to make a nice cliff from scratch

 

[Louise_]

nope I have not done any work to my island, I am too scared too

 

[visibleghost]

i worked with my map and original cliffs a lot. i definitely did terraform a lot but i kept my cliffs at the back of the island and i did keep some parts of my river relatively intact.

i am however planning on removing everything in the lower parts of my island so i can have a blank slate to start working with when designing those parts, but that's just to make it easier for me.

 

[Che5hire Cat]

I did it once and it was the biggest challenge ever I did to myself. It was around a time where I started to get bothered by too many things, I was just not satisfied with how the island looked anymore. Therefore, I decided to start over completely new, wasted a good amount of bells and time into terraforming and get rid off a lot. I'm still working on certain spots that need some fine details, otherwise I'm glad that I did it, since I got now so many new ideas and inspirations, it helped for sure.

 

[Pyoopi]

Sounds like a real nightmare if I did that. My brain does not work like that when it deals with building things. I need primitive shapes to work with than a vast flat land of nothing.