The Animal Crossing series is all about giving the player freedom to create, build, and design however they'd like. However, Animal Crossing: New Horizons makes that customization a little more streamlined through the new tools it has added. One of the biggest quality of life changes is the introduction of the Island Designer app, which allows the player to terraform their island. Skilled designers have recreated iconic locations such as Pokemon's Pallet Town with the tool, but the average player might find more value in simply sprucing their village up with a few paths.
Maintaining one's town is a major part of the Animal Crossing franchise, so it makes sense that Nintendo would simplify the process. In Animal Crossing: New Leaf, players would need to download a QR code and use the pattern as a path. Because of this, the paths were treated as custom floor designs that would often be accidentally removed because the player could simply wipe them away. With the ability to terraform the player's island using the Island Designer app, fans are now able to have actual, permanent pathways throughout their islands.
The Island Designer app, sadly, isn't available early on in the game. Unless they are time traveling, players will actually need to wait quite a while in order to unlock it. Once it's unlocked, though, players will be able to place pathways wherever they would like, helping their island become more of a town. Here's how Animal Crossing: New Horizons players can start placing paths on their island.
How To Make Paths
In order to begin making paths in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, players will need the Island Designer app unlocked. Unlocking the app is really the hard part because the player will need to have had K.K Slider perform at their island first. Since K.K Slider's performance requires an island rating of three stars, for most players the Island Designer app will likely remain locked for a little while.
Once the Island Designer app is unlocked, creating paths is pretty simple. The player only needs to open the app and choose "build paths", which will open a window with path options. Once the player chooses the path that they'd like, they will begin placing it. It is worth noting that not all of the in-game path designs will be available initially, so players will have to unlock some. However, since the ability to use custom designs as paths has returned, players can feel free to go that route instead.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available now, exclusively for the Nintendo Switch.
