A player of magical Animal Crossing garden designs since the title released in 2020, finding new ways to creatively bring to life their perfect island paradise.
Unlike previous mainline games in the Animal Crossing series, New Horizons lets s place furniture and items outdoors. While players still can't place rugs outside, they can supplement the naturally-growing trees, weeds, and flowers that grow across their island with decorative additions, offering lots of opportunities to devise creative and whimsical island designs. From cities to farms, players have used the game to turn their outdoor spaces into almost anything imaginable. Decorating got even easier in November last year, as the 2.0 update added Animal Crossing.
Redditor Strawberybank has impressed the Animal Crossing subreddit with a clip of their island design, showing off their secret bamboo garden path. The video begins with the player at their island entrance, but instead of following the bridge ahead, they instead hop onto small platforms which take them to a series of tiny islands, connected by bridges. Following these takes the player to an area lined with bamboo trees, which slowly open out onto the island's northern beach area where Redd's ship docks. By traveling off the beaten path and hopping the small platforms, the player has cleverly concealed a whole island area, making a beautiful garden path right to Redd.
The player's savvy design makes use of two of Animal Crossing's biggest outdoor design features - waterscaping and bridge-building. As players progress through ACNH, they unlock tools to help them bring their island to life whether by removing or building cliffs, placing bridges and inclines, or adding ponds and rivers. Strawberybank's design relies heavily on waterscaping and on building bridges, both of which can be difficult to achieve due to the cost of bridges and the amount of time it takes to create water spaces.
With the right tools, enough Bells, and some imagination, there's almost no island design that can't be realized in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Strawberybank's impressive outdoor ACNH garden design may be a well-hidden one, but it's also an impressive one, and likely one that took hours of dedication to complete. With lots of praise from Reddit, it's possible the design could inspire similar Animal Crossing island designs in the future.
Source: Strawberybank/Reddit