What mistakes did you make when you first started your island?

[Foreverfox]

Haha, reading these was very nostalgic of my first month in the game. I definitely messed up my rock hits and would only get one, maybe two hits a rock. I also echo the eating of the fruit mom sent me. I put a couple of buildings in awful areas for bridge construction and had to pay move bridge movement, building movement, etc. These mistakes made starting my second island go much smoother though!

 

[Vsmith]

When I dug up money, I closed it back up not knowing about money trees.

 

[griefseed]

i didn't catch any new bugs that i saw and now that i'm trying to catch them all, i'm having to either TT or wait as the seasons change. i've had the game for over a few years now so those opportunities would have saved me a lot of trouble if i'd have just taken them

 

[angelcat621]

I didn't realize the Nook store's cabinet had another panel for at least 3 months. I got my carpet and wallpapers from the Recycle box.

 

[Corrie]

Oh I also placed my villagers houses spread out. I ended up shelling out thousands of bells to move them all into rows when I should've done that to start. It wouldn't have been as bad now that they nerfed the price down but I was a sucker and paid when it was 50k to move a house.

 

[ConfusedDad]

I didn't know you had to go on Mystery Island tours so my lazy villager was autofilled. Luckily, I got Lucky (no pun intended)

 

[Captain Jigglypuff]

Letting my flowers get out of control. I think many people made this mistake at some point. It's just so much harder to move them or get rid of them than in previous games.

I blame Isabelle for that one. She insists that you plant “lots of flowers to increase the Island’s rating!” Yeah. Thanks Isabelle. Now 95% of my Island’s covered with flowers and my rating dropped because of your advice.

 

[VanitasFan26]

Oh man this is going to take me back to 2020. I was struggling to make idea of what I want my island to be. I was just going around making cliffs and rivers because I had no idea what else to think of. My island was in a complete mess I had trees cluttered everywhere, homes were scattered, and so many areas were empty. I was losing my mind because I had no idea how to make a good island. I go and see other people's islands and I did take inspiration from them. Eventually I made my island better thanks to them but then around May 2020 is when I started to feel unhappy with my island.

So I decided to start over and go back to square one. Eventually I made it how I picture in my head that stood out. As the months went by I began tearing down my island and remaking from the way I see it. By October 2020 it was fully completed. Up until I started finally getting rid of it by May 2021 when I got my Switch Lite (2nd island) to help out.

 

[Clock]

What I know is that I regret picking my player and island name.

 

[swiftieaddy13]

i picked the worst layout which caused me to restart and i don’t feel bad about it

 

[Pokeking]

Hmm
1. Landscaping part of the river to create more land because I wanted a two space wide road surrounding Coco's house, but that was before I moved her house from across the river to near the airport which was again moved to where the plot is know.
2. Landscaping part of the cliff near my player house.
These two ended landscaping were needless since they weren't necessary.
3. Town name. If I had originally thought of an all frog island, I would have liked to have had the island name I thought of when I did so. Probably would have been very unique.

 

[Halloqueen]

Had I known at the time that perfect fruit wasn't a mechanic in this game, I would've opted for cherries as my island fruit instead of apples. I figured the Switch graphics would have made the perfect apples extra pretty in New Horizons, but alas. It's not that big of a deal since I have all of the fruit trees and it's not like your island's default fruit plays much of a role in this game, but yeah.

Also, I didn't learn until after I went through the trouble of acquiring my initial Normal, Peppy and Lazy that they, like the starter Jock and Sisterly villagers, would live in basic homes instead of having their personal interior designs. I was disappointed to find that out later.

 

[cherrytheone]

Giving my character, a stupid sounding name.

 

[Fye]

It's not really an in-game thing, but I wish I took more pictures and videos of my island when I first started the game and it was still natural looking. My island is very urban now and I like how it is, but being able to look back at the progress would be nice

 

[Suguri]

I just started NH a few weeks ago and everything is fine, but when I typed my username on the touchscreen while making my save I accidentally misspelled it. With Bill (who was in my old NL town) as one of my first villagers, I had no choice but to stick to “BobRock20” for the time being unless I could homebrew my OLED to edit my save (which is unlikely, as my Switch can’t be hacked)

 

[Pate and Ketchup]

I stopped playing thinking that we would never be able to redecorate our villagers' houses and that the first five would have to disappear to get their real house.
I didn't pay enough attention (or too much attention, it depends) to the shape of the map, to the layout of different things, like the town hall.
ALSO I remember, on May 1st, I left the activity in the maze because I was stuck. I couldn't go back. Bye bye Rover and his briefcase.

 

[Mallika]

In the early days of my island, I used to shake every tree individually to collect branches. I had no idea that you could keep shaking the same tree to get an unlimited supply of branches. It was a real game-changer when I found out! I also had no clue that iron ore would be so crucial to progressing and unlocking the store. I mined iron without a second thought and used it for random DIY projects, only to find out I was short on the iron needed to build the shop.

 

[Bruscoe]

Yeah, I've made a few when I got the game a day after its release.

• I had no idea that fish bait was a thing in the game until April, and by then, the Stringfish went out-of-season. I knew that you could get it in March, but never thought about it until it was too late. I eventually got it on the first day of December, and I had to wait that long anyways to complete the fish exhibit (as the Pond Smelt isn't available to get until then in the Northern Hemisphere). Of course, I proudly archived that moment:

• I forgot to look in the Nook Stop for the 2021 Celebratory Arch on New Year's, and that was the only time ever that you could purchase it. I wasn't happy that I forgot to buy it for catalog completion purposes, but I was able to get the 2022 version at the least when that was offered. After a while, I eventually obtained the 2021 arch through visiting someone's island that had it, so now I can breathe easy.
• There were times that I set up hobby/greeting/catchphrase/favorite preferences by talking to villagers, and I goofed up a few times.
  • For my hobby, I capitalized the first letter of a common word, and the dialogue boxes kept the capitalization all throughout. It looked weird to me, but I've got pretty bad OCD, so there's that. Eventually, however, I was able to fix it.
  • Before the 2.0 update corrected several punctuation mistakes, greetings for most of my villagers wouldn't end with a period or exclamation point. I worked around that easy by adding either in at the end of the greeting I chose, but it would result in sometimes having more than two punctuation symbols. This is no longer a problem with the latest update, so now I don't have to do it anymore.
  • Of course, I chose several catchphrases for my villagers that got stale fast. Some would have me change theirs rather soon, while others kept their phrase going for a long time it seemed. Eventually, I ran out of ideas, and been starting to revert catchphrases back to the defaults if they ask unless it's bad (like Tom's; "me-YOWZA" sounds a bit weird to me IMO, so I've been making him say "man", and I guess he loves it as he's never changed it himself).
• Letting Scoot leave. Though I've since gotten over it, I had been regretting that decision for a while. In my island's "cemetery", he gets two photos instead of one 'cause I cared that much.
• When group stretches were added, I never did a single one for a whole year because I thought that you couldn't use the Pro controller. When I finally decided to get off my lazy bum for an afternoon, I read that you can use it after all. That mysterious blue star hit me really hard right there. Yes, I attended 50 separate times, and got the bonus reactions for doing that.
• I originally thought you could just sneak up to any beetle at normal speed with a net and it would not fly away. Boy, was I sorely mistaken. It took me a while to figure that out with the Rainbow Stag.
• Many times in HHP, I'll want to room someone with a different villager, only to do the process incorrectly and make a whole new house instead. Whenever that happens, I just say "screw it" and leave it like that.

That's all I can think of at the top of my head.

 

[Giddy]

I guess if you're thinking of terraforming and such, the one thing I didn't do was put all the villagers on the beach. Though I was fine with this, since it was my first time playing I didn't mind, and it's not a very serious issue.

 

[Mountain_Elements]

ACNH is my first Animal Crossing game, and I started playing it in June. I've been torn between looking things up so that I don't miss anything and not looking things up so that I can discover them for myself. I joined this forum to get the fruit I was missing after finally realizing that I couldn't get them from Mystery Islands, and I've been learning a lot.

I made a lot of mistakes that have been already mentioned in this thread including not knowing about running, not being careful about where I place stuff, and planting way too flowers. In addition to those, I hadn't realized that I could select more than one item at once in Nook's Cranny. The beginning of my game had me going through a long, frustrating process of buying or selling one item at a time each time I visited the store until I finally figured that out.

I also didn't know about creeping up on bugs. I just repeatedly took a step, stopped until the bug went back to normal, and then took another step. Fortunately, I managed to catch all of the beetles available in July and Aug. with this method so it worked out.

I've just learned about the ways to manipulate which villager asks to leave your island so I'll be trying that to get rid of Rodney. I had no idea how unpopular he was until recently. I thought it was just me, and I'm still not sure what makes everyone else hate him so much. For me, my sister pointed out that he reminded me of a character in another game that my character had married because I took pity on him, and then he lazed around the house and kept talking about alcohol.