One of my first mistakes in Animal Crossing: New Horizons was to just place buildings willy-nilly. I erroneously assumed that it would be just like in Animal Crossing: New Leaf where I don’t have any control where the residents build their houses.
So, when my first two residents were choosing the spots for their tents and they asked my thoughts about it I was all “Sure, whatever, build wherever you like it is not like my opinion will matter anyway!”. But even when I had to choose the placement of buildings like the museum I still made some mistakes. In this case I thought, for some reason, that the resident services tent would eventually turn into the Nook’s Cranny so I placed my museum in a spot that would probably be better for the shop.
It wasn’t until I started visiting friend’s islands, reading about other’s experiences with the game and seeing people’s screenshots on Twitter that it sunk how badly my mistakes were. Like with every creative project I start the nasty thought of “Mine isn’t as cool as theirs” started to worm itself into my head.
Fortunately New Horizons does provide some tools to correct those mistakes. I just had to get to the point where the resident services tent upgraded to a building, which happened to me last Friday, to be able to pay for buildings to be moved around. Yes, pay. With my hard earned bells. Because apparently they know me too well and if it wasn’t paid I’d just be moving the buildings around forever until I found the “perfect” spot for them.
My first order of business has been to move the museum so I can try to prettify the entrance to my island and move Nook’s Cranny to a more convenient spot to my visitors. It costs fifty thousand bells which isn’t a quantity to sneeze at considering I still have house loans and other island improvements to pay for but it is money I am willing to spend to start fixing my mistakes.
I am pretty sure the new spot I chose will not be final one as I will probably try to do something crazy once I get the terraforming tools. I just have some ideas I got from those twitter screenshots I mentioned earlier. For now though it will do.
Interesting enough the old building isn’t destroyed right away. It was still there while the new one was being built. The next morning the museum was in the new spot and the old one was just as empty as the day I came to the island.
Unfortunately I grossly miscalculated the space that would be left and I couldn’t just move the Nook’s Cranny to that spot. At least not without sacrificing the paths and other ideas I was building. So I moved my shop to a temporary spot, then this morning I moved it to its proper place and hopefully by tomorrow the Nook’s Cranny should be in its rightful place! Unless I change my mind later which is always a possibility!
Now the other big revamping problem is what to do with the animal’s houses. I was happy to postpone that for as long as possible but Tom Nook’s plans interfered with mine. I just had a camp built in my island and apparently I can’t move the story forward until I convince the new visitor to become a permanent resident.
I was actually fine with the idea since I got O’Hare and he is a cool bunny. Or hare. Or something like that. Anyway, he is a cool guy and I am happy to have him in my island. The only problem was where to build his house. Since I can’t decide what to do in terms of residential area I just placed it in a sort of random place and will move it later. Probably with all the other resident’s houses too. This will be a much longer, much more expensive undertaking…. which will be done as soon as I can decide anything about it.
On a random note, I found out that the way I was getting iron nuggets was completely wrong! You see, when I started the game one of my residents said that if I ate fruit I could move trees and break down rocks so I thought that was how I should get them!
During a conversation with one of my friends this weekend she told me that wasn’t the right way, that I could just hit the rock multiple times with my shovel and get the drops that way. Unnecessary to say I felt very stupid at this revelation. Despite that I didn’t really feel frustrated by that. I mean, sure, I took the longest path to get those 30 iron nuggets for the Nook’s Cranny but I still got it
I felt more like “With this method I will be able to get so much more iron nuggets that I will be able to do a lot more interesting things in a much shorter time!”. I can even upgrade some tools now which was something I was avoiding due to how fast they break!
If anyone else found themselves in the same boat, here is the best way to get Iron Nuggets.
So, that was my weekend in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. If you have been playing this game too, what have you been up to in your own island?