When starting a new island, what do you work on first?

[Lethalia]

I finally have terraforming and waterscaping unlocked, and I think I have all my codes downloaded and a ton of items from my wishlist. Everything I was doing to procrastinate designing my island is complete, and now I'm stuck. I don't know if I should make my entrance first or my neighborhood.

My neighborhood is going to be on the very far left of my island and it's going to be multiple symmetrical tiers. It's a lot of work and a lot of moving buildings around, but I feel like it'd help me get things out of the way, some of which are crowded near my entrance. So it makes sense to work on that first, but because it's a bigger project, it's going to be tons of work and my laziness makes me not want to bother with it right now.

So I could do my entrance first, but like I said, some buildings are kind of in the way of my entrance. I could work around it and move it later, but now I'm having trouble visualizing how I want it because of the buildings, so...

What do you guys usually start with and in what order do you complete parts of your island?

 

[dragonair]

Personally I do a really bad concept drawing of how I want my map to look. This includes where the buildings are going and where the villager's houses are going and the outlines of the mountains and rivers as well. Then I'll work on flattening in game and then terraforming outlines for where I want things. Then I place little placeholders for the houses and once I like how those look I start moving all my buildings off the beach so I can properly work on terraforming. If the houses are on top of the mountains I work on filling those out first though!

Here's a really really bad example of my concept map lol:

 

[Moon Cake]

I'm redoing my island in a similar way to yours! I also have a multilevel neighborhood on the left side of my building. What I decided to do was start with my entrance by moving all the buildings onto the beach so I had ample space to work with. If I got tired of working on my entrance, I would do a little bit of work on my neighborhood, such as plotting how big each neighbor's yard would be and determining when each new level would start.

I would say just go ahead and try some things out, and don't worry too much about whether or not it's perfect! I moved my museum to a new spot one day, and then moved it again the other day to a better spot.

 

[Moritz]

Well I have 2 switches and 2 copies of the game.
So I was able to have terraforming from the get go.

The very first thing was making my map.

I made my island exactly how I wanted it

 

[Lethalia]

Personally I do a really bad concept drawing of how I want my map to look. This includes where the buildings are going and where the villager's houses are going and the outlines of the mountains and rivers as well. Then I'll work on flattening in game and then terraforming outlines for where I want things. Then I place little placeholders for the houses and once I like how those look I start moving all my buildings off the beach so I can properly work on terraforming. If the houses are on top of the mountains I work on filling those out first though!

Here's a really really bad example of my concept map lol:
View attachment 409288

The map is really cute and looks so useful! Must be so helpful to have your mental image laid out in front of you visually. Very good idea

Post automatically merged: Nov 1, 2021

I'm redoing my island in a similar way to yours! I also have a multilevel neighborhood on the left side of my building. What I decided to do was start with my entrance by moving all the buildings onto the beach so I had ample space to work with. If I got tired of working on my entrance, I would do a little bit of work on my neighborhood, such as plotting how big each neighbor's yard would be and determining when each new level would start.

I would say just go ahead and try some things out, and don't worry too much about whether or not it's perfect! I moved my museum to a new spot one day, and then moved it again the other day to a better spot.

That's genius to move buildings to the beach! I just did that with my Nook's Cranny and the two starter houses and that freed up the space needed for me to start on my entrance. And thanks for the encouragement, it's always hard to take the first step

Post automatically merged: Nov 2, 2021

Well I have 2 switches and 2 copies of the game.
So I was able to have terraforming from the get go.

The very first thing was making my map.

I made my island exactly how I wanted it

Nice, it seems like mapping things out physically really helps the process along. I'm unfortunately too lazy for it, so the mental image alone will have to suffice for me lol