Terraforming Frustration

[Rave]

Terraforming is ending up feeling like more work than fun, not sure if I'm just burnt out or what. Wanted to do a cool waterfall entrance, then realized a few things:

1, my town hall is only... 6 blocks away from my dock, so waterfalls on either side just blocks it off in a really weird way. This kind of messes with any entrance idea I would have had, since any kind of long walkway clashes with town hall's tiles annoyingly.

2, trying to make careful multi level structures is really annoying. There's no guides or anything, so I'm constantly having my character do the "miss/no valid tile" animation? Guess you're just supposed to make a bunch of 'construction' blocks then get rid of them later? This could just be me being bad at building though.

3, I wanted to line the entrance with palm tree lamps on their own blocks in the water, until I realized that they're 1.5 x 1.5, so just slightly too big to have a nice 3x spacing on.

Gah. Of course all of this is fixable by just undoing the cliffs/waterways, but I'm really annoyed at the lack of ability to move town hall... It isn't really worth resetting over, but feels like a major hindrance to pretty much anything I wanted to do with it. Guess I'll just throw some bikes in front of town hall or something. Considering just razing down every cliff/river on my island and just starting from scratch : P Plus, it's hard to not compare your own town to cooler builds out there. I'm sure I'd be feeling the same if my map looked any different, but I still wish I'd noticed the unchangeable stuff before I'd gotten so far in.

Here's the full map as of right now. Maybe everything would look better if things were more segmented?

 

[Eirrinn]

Terraforming was a giant chore for me. I usually listen to a podcast or something while I’m doing it lol
If you wanna see what your island will look like before you terraform I believe there’s a website that lets you make your own map from scratch

 

[Pyoopi]

Honestly, I barely started to terraform. I tried to one thing on whim and that was proven to be very annoying because I was just trying to build a ramp to my secret beach, so I dug downward and felt like everything was set. And then,

"The rocks are unstable to build here!"
"There is no cliff to set the ramp here!!"
"That tree might collapse on you!!!11"
"NOOOO!!"

So I'm paper-mapping now because that was painful and I would like not to get cranky at this. lol

 

[Sharpington]

Two things I DESPERATELY wish terraforming had:
1. different buttons for adding and removing things
2. a highlighted indication of what square your character is targeting

I think those two things would remove 90% of my frustrations. When I'm trying to do big areas my character is constantly destroying things I want and adding things I don't. It feels like I am playing with an annoying little brother that messes things up for fun. ("Don't do that!!" "don't put that there!!" "Stop destroying things!!") And I don't even have a little brother.

I initially wanted to put waterfalls everywhere, which is a nightmare to do, and then I decided I wanted the top 1/4th of my town to all be one solid 3rd story cliff, which was also a nightmare. It can be really rewarding when I get an area to look just right, but it also feels like I'm fighting the game sometimes.

OP, maybe instead of making the entrance long North/South-wise you could stretch it out from the East/West, with big decorated areas on either side?

 

[Rave]

Honestly, I barely started to terraform. I tried to one thing on whim and that was proven to be very annoying because I was just trying to build a ramp to my secret beach, so I dug downward and felt like everything was set. And then,

"The rocks are unstable to build here!"
"There is no cliff to set the ramp here!!"
"That tree might collapse on you!!!11"
"NOOOO!!"

So I'm paper-mapping now because that was painful and I would like not to get cranky at this. lol

YEAH there's *so* many annoying conditions, I wish it'd like tell you or give you exact radius' for where you could build or something. Think I'll either use the mapping website or just draw it out !

Two things I DESPERATELY wish terraforming had:
1. different buttons for adding and removing things
2. a highlighted indication of what square your character is targeting

I think those two things would remove 90% of my frustrations. When I'm trying to do big areas my character is constantly destroying things I want and adding things I don't. It feels like I am playing with an annoying little brother that messes things up for fun. ("Don't do that!!" "don't put that there!!" "Stop destroying things!!") And I don't even have a little brother.

I initially wanted to put waterfalls everywhere, which is a nightmare to do, and then I decided I wanted the top 1/4th of my town to all be one solid 3rd story cliff, which was also a nightmare. It can be really rewarding when I get an area to look just right, but it also feels like I'm fighting the game sometimes.

OP, maybe instead of making the entrance long North/South-wise you could stretch it out from the East/West, with big decorated areas on either side?

Apparently there just straight aren't enough buttons, but at least make destroying a slightly longer button press or something. I constantly finally find the one right angle the game will let you build something at, then accidently destroy it and have to fiddle around with positioning again. And an indicator, PLEASE. Measuring stuff out is really annoying, since you basically have to rely on just digging a bunch of holes if you want to count anything out. Another minor thing is that you can build up to 4th level, but can't actually climb up, making placing waterfalls at level 3 impossible.

I think that's what I'll do! I've converted the little space in front of it into a bike parking, might move both the shops next to it and just have the entrance be the hex the hall is in plus the one to the left.

Post automatically merged: Apr 20, 2020

Terraforming was a giant chore for me. I usually listen to a podcast or something while I’m doing it lol
If you wanna see what your island will look like before you terraform I believe there’s a website that lets you make your own map from scratch

AC would be great to play while catching up on some podcasts/series' ! There was a meteor shower tonight so I kept my volume up, but I'll have to do that when I don't have anything else to juggle.

 

[Hay]

Theres been so many times where I either:

A) Cant remove the block because of a tree/flower or it misses the block when im not close enough to it
B) Remove parts of my rivers or lake to get the look I wanted but now my river or lake is ugly

Im not the best at terriforming but from what I get its really annoying sometimes

 

[lucitine]

I think I had the same problem as you with the town hall. When I picked my map, I didnt realise terraforming was a thing, nor did I have any clue how I wanted to decorate. I now have something built in front of my entrance, but it makes the camera angle view for town hall kind of awkward and annoying.

I also wasn't aware there was a limitation in the number of inclines/bridges, so I had to change my plan for my house. Also, I really really hate that the cliffs need to be one block in from the edge of the bottom level. Why? Why do I need to have that one block? Why cant it be flush?

Its frustrating that you can't move the town hall. I really hope that they decide to change this in one of the updates.

Ive just been working on it little bits at a time so I don't get too exhausted or too frustrated with it.

 

[Raz]

I love the mechanic, and to be honest, after doing a lot of terraforming on the island, I'm not yet satisfied with the result.

Ironically, I came across a post on Reddit yesterday that showed an island that was built almost exactly how I was planning to build mine. And they have EXACTLY the same initial layout as your island.

I'm gonna start the whole process of terraforming 2.0 today, and I know it's a slow process but I enjoy it.

Give a look at the island I mentioned

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnimalCrossing/comments/g2b1p9