Genius Animal Crossing New Horizons trick lets you place houses perfectly

Transforming your town and moving your villagers’ houses into the perfect spots can prove to be a bit tricky at times, especially if you’re still planning your permanent island layout. Thankfully, there’s an easier way.

We all know the struggle of wanting to change your housing placements once you unlock terraforming and your island opens up fully, and it’s overwhelming to decide where to put them if you haven’t thought about how your finished town is going to look.

With moving fees costing 50,000 Bells a pop, you really can’t afford to keep shifting them around until you find the perfect place – but one simple trick might make things a lot easier for you, and be nicer to your wallet.

New Horizons house trick

Reddit user _Greyling_ showed off their method in the form of a video. In their town, instead of placing the houses and then having to build their town around them, they instead planned out where they were going to go first before anyone had even moved in, all thanks to the terraforming tool.

“I’ve been using a grid system to plan out my town, using path squares as markers,” they said in the clip’s caption. “Haven’t had a misplaced building, yet, and I can have each villager’s yard or patio in place before they even move in.”

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With the Island Designer app – which is unlocked after K.K. Slider visits your island after getting a three-star rating – they show how using the path placing tool to measure out a 5×5 grid can be used to mark out where villagers’ homes are going to go.

They showed how they’d then built their town around the grids, rather than setting houses in temporary places and having to pay 50,000 in order to shift them if they want to build something else there.

While having patches of dirt and grass doesn’t look all that appealing, it’s a much better alternative than forking out that kind of cash for every home you want to move – it’d end up costing an absolute fortune.

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The trick is great for people who want to design their island layout completely before moving all 10 villagers in, whether that’s by amiibo card, Mystery Islands, or just letting fate decide.