Okay, so this happened.
And then almost immediately this happened.
I’m Carolyn and I like to restart islands, apparently. I have absolutely nothing to say in my own defense except that I read The Enchanted Greenhouse (Sarah Beth Durst), fell in love with Belde, and wanted to rename my second island right away. Life would be so much simpler if ACNH just let us change the island names. Of course I had to decide this after I’d finished the main storyline and gotten my terraforming back. Sorry, Shady Holl. You were a good little island but I just like Belde better. The downside is that I am once again without terraforming capabilities. T_T On the other hand, I wasn’t starting completely from scratch; as with the last restart, I transferred goods and money to Jelly Cove before I deleted anything. I am currently working very hard not to cop out and take money from Jelly Cove to fully upgrade the house.
As far as the house goes, I had originally envisioned it as a studio set-up with a separate bathroom and it was super cute, but I really needed the storage so I reluctantly added the third room. Every house I make is different; currently this one is holding onto its studio-like main room, with a bathroom in the back and a library off to the side. For posterity, here it is being all cute and perfect before I torpedoed it for the sake of extra storage space.
And here it is now, with the new library in progress. Those patchwork sofas made the move with me from Shady Holl because they were given to me by Lori and I am not getting rid of them. I wish I had them IRL, though I don’t know where I would put them.
I have to admit that I love the idea of a sweet little windowless library cave. I hadn’t originally intended on making it windowless until I picked up that mossy paper from Saharah, tried it out, and actually liked it. It could of course change later, but for now it’s fine. While I normally have an office/crafting room in every house, this time I want the house to be quite different from the norm, so most likely the office space will either stay in the library or move out to the main room; or it might end up on the second floor, whenever I’m able to add that. Right now I’m thinking that the next room will become a guest room, possibly mermaid-themed. My very first island (we’re talking OG Jelly Cove) had a guest room IIRC, but I think it eventually got sacrificed for office space, or it was just lost when the first Jelly Cove got restarted.
Outside of the house we’re just off Festivale, which I barely managed to catch (completely forgot about it tbh), and I still have the decorations up because I worked hard for those, dammit. We also celebrated my birthday (not sure how the game knows about my lifelong vendetta against broccoli) and have seen our two first snowmen, who have been decidedly bitter about their creation. Still working on those. :’)
Exterior shots/villagers/first visit from Kicks:
I know my life is a fucking joke to this game, but Shep has to go. >:( Literally why do I always end up with the ugliest dregs of the villager list every goddamn time. Why can I never get Marshal or Coco or Lolly or somebody on startup? Is that really too much to ask? Shep is marginally better than Beardo, but where are the cute villagers I don’t have to chase off the island with a net? (Maple is fine. I invited her. She’s adorable. She was low-key on my list of acceptable villagers long before I actually ran across her. Willow and Cephalobot can stay too. Dizzy and Tad are okay as placeholders until something better comes along. The rest of them gotta go. I am particularly offended by Truffles.) At the very least I am sitting on a stack of NMTs and my odds of replacing an objectionable villager with a cute camper are fairly good, given the ratio of acceptable villagers to objectionable villagers, so I’m playing a waiting game. At least I don’t have to worry too much about potentially replacing somebody I love, though Maple has already asked to move out once and I don’t know what could possibly be wrong with her life. I mean, yes, I have hit other villagers with a net to get them to stop talking to me, but baby, I can explain. ;_;
A serendipitous discovery fueled by spite: I can absolutely remove that Festivale stage while somebody is dancing on it. I tried it last night on Rowan and it worked. It was literally like yanking the rug out from under his feet. He looked so disgruntled. It was great. I got it on video. Also I genuinely did not know his name was Rowan until I looked it up just now. Really wish the campsite would stop spitting out uggos so I can kick him out.
Anyway, I’m way more excited about this island than I was about Shady Holl in spite of the demanding snowmen who have way too many thoughts for those teeny-tiny little pea-sized heads. I’m looking forward to getting my terraforming back again, though in the meantime I actually don’t mind Belde’s natural cliffs. The secret beach is so hidden that I probably would have forgotten it forever if it weren’t for Redd’s boat. My house is on a mini island at the confluence of the rivers and it might just stay there forever because that spot is absolutely perfect. I don’t yet know what direction I want to take with this island, but I have been toying with the idea of a “floating” neighborhood, i.e., the villagers’ houses are all partitioned by waterways. I have seen that done on other people’s islands and tried it myself, though it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. Maybe it’s time for a fresh attempt. We’re at two stars at the moment, so if I put up some fences and plant some more flowers we should be good.
One final shot of Shady Holl before the close:
And one final question for Tom: If Nook Inc. owns the land and is making money from moving people in, why the fuck am I the one paying 10 grand literally to put land on sale? Or, more accurately, why am I buying land on behalf of these assholes I haven’t even met? The rest of us had to pay our way, why can’t they pay for the land that they theoretically are buying? I’d have fewer objections if the exchange rate were 10k bells/10k miles, but it’s 10k bells/1k miles, which doesn’t seem like an equitable trade. BOYCOTT TOM CROOK.
