Is it true that you can change your island's layout?

[Blood Eclipse]

Hi, I finally decided to start playing my New Horizons game, and I've been resetting for like an hour or two already trying to get my favorite native fruit and map layout, but I read somewhere (probably IGN) that your map isn't that important as you can terraform in this game. Is that true? If so, just how much can you change on your island? Are you able to change which way the river flows?

 

[Sanaki]

While you can create rivers and stuff, you can't change river endings or the resident services.

 

[stargurg]

you can't change your river exits, though you can change the river path from exit to exit. you can't change where your town hall goes, but you can change where museum, ables, & nook's cranny is! you also can't change where airport, hidden beach, and or pier is.

 

[mocha.]

Yep, you can terraform although there are limitations. If I could give any advice it would be don't go for the first map you see unless you absolutely love it - terraforming is a lot of work and takes patience and time to get the results you want. You also can't change the river mouth so they will stay the same, as will resident services. Although you can replant which fruits you'd like, the stamp of your native fruit still appears on your passport so just keep that in mind if that's something that would bother you.

Overall, I found terraforming to be overwhelming and have restarted 3 times because of this. I'm now taking a slower approach and playing day by day rather than TTing so I can plan things out more effectively. It's fun to mess around with the limitations, but just don't go in with the assumption that you can change everything

 

[Blood Eclipse]

Thank all you very much! Glad I found out before going further. Looks like I'll have to reset a bit longer and take more precaution.

 

[Mairen]

This game is really fantastic in all of the changes you can make to your map in comparison to New Leaf. The only things you cannot change is your airport location, resident services location, dock location, location of your two river outlets, and the peninsula that sticks out on one of the sides of your map. The beaches are also a permanent thing, you cannot alter the shape of the beaches

What you can do is move all of the buildings around (except for the ones listed above), reform your cliffs entirely (or even remove them), create new rivers or reshape the one you start with.