After progressing further into Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you will need to change certain aspects of your Island, and for that, you will need to unlock the Island Designer app.
The Island Designer app in your NookPhone will allow you to perform terraforming to change the look of certain parts of your Island to your liking. You can create new paths, take down conflicting cliffs, or remove any water bodies, opening up new possibilities to make the Island your engineering marvel.
How to unlock Island Designer App for Terraforming
To become the architect you have dreamed of and start terraforming, you must first get your hands on the ‘Island Designer App’ in Animal Crossing: New Horizon. You can get this from Tom Nook immediately after K.K. Slider does his first show on the Island.
You must have completed the following prerequisites to bring K.K. to perform a show on your Island.
- Build the museum
- Set up Nook’s Cranny
- Build your own house.
- Invite more villagers to move to your Island.
- Upgrade the Island to a 3-star ranking.
Once everything mentioned above is done, K.K. will show up and sing the game’s theme song. After that, talk to Tom Nook to get the Island Designer App to start terraforming.
What can the Island Designer App do?
Initially, you will have limited options to play around with for terraforming in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which is essentially only grass and dirt. You can buy more terraforming features from Nook Stop at Resident Services for 2,000 Nook Miles.
To be able to change cliffs and water, you will have to buy permits for permission that cost 6,000 Nook Miles. After unlocking all features, you can perform the following actions using the Island Designer App in Animal Crossing.
- You can add bridges.
- You can change the fundamental layout of the entire Island that you chose at the start.
- Add or customize paths and Fences.
- Request Cleanup
- Edit water bodies and cliffs.
- Create slopes.
This is where the real game starts, and it’s finally time to show off all your creative plans for your Island. Terraform the entire Island into a beautiful landscape using your imagination. If you want to test the changes you can make before implementing them in the ACNH, you can use some Island Planner Apps.
Are there any other Island Planner Apps?
There are a few apps that you can use to visualize the changes before implementing them in Animal Crossing: New Horizon and spending your resources. The two most used are the Happy Island Designer and 3D Island Planner.
You can head to the Happy Island Designer website and use this app. However, to better visualize how your Island will look after terraforming in ACNH, you can use the 3D Island Planner. We will recommend you download it instead of using the website version for planning your island.
Once you have installed this app, you will get the same options as the Island Designer app in ACNH provides you. After ensuring you like the design you created in the planner app, you can start the game and spend Bells to replicate the planner app design. Planning certain sections with this is better than planning your whole Island.
