A Fan-Made Animal Crossing: New Horizons Map Tool Gives You a Head Start on Your Island Home

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is almost here, but it's understandable if the closer it gets, the harder the wait to start your idyllic island community becomes. Thankfully, a fan has whipped up a new tool that will help you get a head start on planning a not-so-deserted island that suits your wants and needs perfectly (and, hopefully, that will get your mind off the wait).

Eugeneration's Happy Island Designer is a browser-based app that lets you reshape an overhead map of a New Horizons island however you'd like. At the start of New Horizons you'll have a largely unpopulated island and little control over its layout, but past a certain point you'll unlock the ability to create bridges, staircases, and—in an Animal Crossing series first—even reshape the island's terrain.

The Happy Island Designer tool also includes markers for trees, houses, buildings, and other structures, so you can go beyond topography to start planning exactly where you want your islanders to live, shop, and roam.

Of course, once New Horizons is out, if you don't want to engage with obsessive community planning you won't really be asked to. Also, there's nothing stopping you from just messing around with the Happy Island Designer to make odd landmasses that probably aren't feasible in New Horizons, as this Reddit user did in an homage to Untitled Goose Game.

For more on Animal Crossing: New Horizons, check out our impressions from PAX East 2020, see what id Software has to say about those Doom Eternal crossover memes with Isabelle, and be sure to keep our guides section handy once the game launches. Animal Crossing: New Horizons comes out on March 20 for the Nintendo Switch.

Thanks, Animal Crossing World.