Good morning folks! Another fine day here in Pandemia, where I have created a welcome sign at the docks for everyone who might visit. Yesterday was the day when I actually started trying to give a shit about how things looked and quickly realized that I have way the hell too many trees on the island. One of the things that I wish I could do is flip into a grid system in the outside world like I can in housing because trying to control with any semblance of precision where I am facing with an analog joystick is most definitely a challenge.
One of the things that I spent part of yesterday morning researching was how to best place tress to make sure that they would grow. I’ve accidentally placed a few of the fruit I collected from island hopping and my fruit exchange party in too close of quarters. Apparently trees like a little bit of social distancing and as a result I documented some of my research in pictogram form. Essentailly based on what I could tell a tree needs a ring of eight empty squares around it, which makes sense because the same thing is true with trying to maximize the yield from banging on a rock. That means that if I wanted to be absolutely efficient I would set up a grid pattern like shown above and spend time moving all of my trees into that arrangement.
[UPDATE] – Based on Stephen’s comment it seems as though the trees need a ring of 8 empty squares but can apparently square an empty square with another tree, so in theory that means you can compact things down even tighter to something like this grid above. Again I really wish that I could flip into grid mode like you can with a house to allow for more precise placement, but as I start moving my trees around I will experiment with packing them in tighter and then potentially can leave only things like my money trees out in the open with everything else in the orchard.
The other thing that I spent time researching was flower arrangement and hybridization. There is a twitter user @GracieSwitch that has a ton of really good guides in thread form. Unfortunately between yesterday and today the user has locked down their account and as such they are not readily available. I am guessing either someone started using the guides without credit or was a jerk to the user. [EDIT] – turns out it was just an overwhelming amount of social media interaction. As such I have attempted to recreate the concepts from memory and if I manage to bungle something please forgive me. The basic layout for flowers is a grid pattern where you are skipping every other square. As I understand it on a given day a new flower can spawn in any one of the open squares if you have watered the flowers during the previous day.
When the flower is in between two different colors a hybrid flower can spawn with a new color. Essentially as I understand it you have three options for a new flower where it could spawn with either of the original colors or if you are lucky you might get a new color. Polygon has a guide outlining which colors can be produced from which species of flowers so I suggest you go over there and read that if you are wanting something specific. Since I have no clue what I am doing and am mostly just working with Tulips I planted the majority of my flowers in grid pattern.
Now here is where I am hoping my memory holds up, because @GracieSwitch outlined another method that is supposedly more predictable in the results of your flower generation. The idea being that you have two flowers side by side and then the maximum possible empty space around them without overlapping allowing for lots of possible area for flower generation. Of course however you can see that you need a lot more empty space but I also set up an area near my house that has some of this going on so we will see if any of these schemes worked. Once you have a flower generator set up the way that you want, the idea is that each day you harvest any new flower spawns and water your flower bed in preparation for the next possible day of spawning.
[ANOTHER UPDATE] – Turns out the I need to credit @TwillitPrince for the flower placement pattern that was in the @GracieSwitch thread I referenced.
I feel like I need to give the very important disclaimer that once again… Animal Crossing New Horizon is my first Animal Crossing game. I am figuring all of this out for the first time and am standing on the backs of all of the AC players that came before me. I am just sharing whatever I happen across in case someone else is needing to figure these things out as well. However if anything I post is incorrect please by all means comment below and correct me. I am always open to thoughtful criticism. I mean I don’t love the folks who pedantically point out some spelling or grammatical error, but I am always down with someone correcting me on factual bits.
You can actually place trees a bit closer together and they still grow. They do need a ring of 8 empty squares around them, but each tree doesn’t need their own separate empty squares, they can have the same ones. It means they only need one empty square between them. I have my own orchard growing and i have more trees that way.
Cool I will swap out images later to reflect this. Thanks for the info.