[Animal Crossing] I have been validated by an adorable virtual shih tzu!

[flamebyrd]

This morning I checked my island rating with Isabelle in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Switch) and it came back as 4-stars. She suggested I might want to clear up some of the items on the ground. Oh, I thought! I'm almost at 5 stars!

Spoilers: I was not close to 5 stars.

I am, however, very stubborn.

There are a lot of guides for how to hit 5 stars, and I'm here to tell you that a lot of what they say is not what I did, but it may be easier or faster to follow those instructions anyway. I chose to just follow whatever Isabelle suggested to me and change what I was doing when her suggestion changed.

Here's what I had when I finally hit 5 stars:

- 9 houses with villagers (not 10, the max)
- The first version of Nook's Cranny (not the upgraded version).
- Fully-renovated house (final mortgage not yet paid off).
- Flowers everywhere. If I couldn't see at least two flowers on a screen on my island, I planted more. I did most of this before the 3 star rating and didn't have to plant any more to achieve 5 stars.
- 5 fossils placed outside (duplicates of ones already in the museum).
- A handful of items ordered with Nook Miles - maybe 15.
- A large amount of items obtained via Nook's Cranny, balloons or from villagers (or re-ordered versions of these from the catalogue).
- A huge amount of crafted items. This included a lot of iron tables/chairs because I have a lot of iron.
- Everywhere on my island I couldn't see a placed item, I placed an item - usually two. Even if it didn't make sense there. This was very painful.
- ~15 bushes.
- Not a lot of seasonal items (less than 5, unless the shell series counts).
- Lots of paths all around the south-east quadrant of my island, but minimal amounts in the rest.
- Fences in all sections of the island, at Isabelle's suggestion. I made mostly stone fences and hedges because I have a lot of stone/weeds and not much wood. This was annoying and a lot of them are placed along cliffs where they are functionally useless.

This took ~5 hours of solid playtime. I went back and forth to Isabelle many, many times.

Comments

[runpunkrun]

Will your rating go down if you remove the stuff? Or do you only need to get the 5 stars once to unlock an achievement or something?

I've only played Animal Crossing on the GameCube, so a lot of this stuff is totally new to me.

[flamebyrd]

Oops, sorry for the late reply! Yes, the rating goes down again if I mess with it, sadly. You get an item and a special flower sometimes grows while you have a 5-star rating so I wanted to get it for that, and now that I've done it I feel accomplished and can mess with it to my heart's content!

[runpunkrun]

That's good news. Having random stuff strewn all over my island would drive me bananas.