After terraforming your island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons it’s time to lay down some paths and decorate! Check out this guide to see my process for beautifying a space. See how to use the path permits, how I used custom path designs, and how I placed furniture around my house to make a cozy little area to live. Happy island designing!

To get started, open up the Island Designer app on your NookPhone and press + to access the different paths. Path permits can be purchased from the Nook Stop for 2,000 miles each, except for the custom design permit, which is 2,300 miles.

I didn’t like how the standard paths looked in this area, so I’ll only be using custom designs today. The designs I use are listed below!

Once you’ve collected all the custom designs you want to use, choose your path and press A to lay it down. When working with standard paths, press A a second time to round the corner. When working with custom designs, pressing A a second time will remove the design from the ground.

I like to start by laying down a base design to get a general sense of the path. Then I go in with variant designs — the circle and broken stone designs in this case — to make the path look more natural and worn down.

Now that I have the main stone path down, it’s time to start adding furniture to the area!

After setting up the garden table and chairs, I want to work on my picnic area by the sea. But I’ve run into a problem. The gray blanket’s tassel design takes up an entire square, making the overall possible blanket size smaller. The blue blanket is bigger, but with all the blue items I’ve selected for the picnic, it just seems too blue and bright.

To solve this, I’ve reoriented the gray blanket to be horizontal and chosen fewer items to place on it. It’s a smaller picnic, but I think it’s cute! I also set the ocean picnic mood by playing Aloha K.K.

I went back to the stone path and extended it to the rocky area. The creator included a scattered leaves design too, so I used that to fill in the ground area more and add the the natural forest aesthetic I’m going for.

Then I laid out a pink picnic blanket by the waterfalls to match the cherry blossom outdoor picnic set. I also decided to add the stone path here to connect to the entrance path behind the cliffs.

The same creator also made a wood path design — so cute! I thought it would look good leading to the picnic area by the sea.

The rocky area at the back of my island looked too plain with just the swing bench and stone seat, so I used the blue picnic blanket design and a couple other picnic items to brighten up the area and add some color.

Thanks for reading! I hope this was helpful 💖