How to make a rock garden in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

March 23, 2023

We’ve all seen those amazing rock gardens in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and the first question everybody has is ‘how do you make one?’ … Look no further, as we have everything you need to know.

One of the biggest objectives in New Horizons is to decorate your island with different features. Some of the more popular choices are forests, elaborate town entrances, and marketplaces, just to name a few. The introduction of the Island Designer app and the terraforming tool means that the possibilities are endless.

In the latest Animal Crossing, players are also able to smash rocks in order to either move them somewhere else or to gain materials such as iron, stone, or clay. Usually, when broken, their new positioning is random, but players have found a way to force rocks into specific places to form a ‘rock garden’ – and here’s how they’re doing it.

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People have been making some insane areas by planning where they want their rocks to be.

How to make a rock garden in New Horizons

Having all your rocks in one area is actually a rather tedious process, but it’s well worth the time. It will also take around a week in order to move them all to their desired places – unless you want to use time travel to speed it up, of course.

You’ll also need a shovel, obviously, as well as six pieces of fruit, a Custom Design pattern, the 7×5 area you want the garden to be in, and the Island Designer app as it’ll make your life so much easier. You can make it 7×9 if you’d like the area to be fenced in, either works.

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If you want all six rocks in one area, you’ll have to place them between grid lines.

If you open up your map, you’ll see that your island is actually set up as a grid. Each section only allows you to have four rocks, but you can get around this and place all six by placing them between two of the lines.

They won’t spawn on hard paths such as brick or wood, by the edges of cliffs, rivers or ponds, on the beach, by trees, or adjacent to any buildings, so bear that in mind when planning your space.

Once you’ve found your chosen area, you’ll want to plan out where you want the rocks to go. The easiest way of doing this is by using the Island Designer app to place a path tile where you want each one, and then using a different type of path in all the spots in between.

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An example of how the planning should look, depending on where you want your rocks.

After that’s done, you’re going to want to eat the fruit and then break all six of your rocks. Then block off all spaces where new ones can spawn in – just be mindful that they need eight blocks around them in order for them to appear.

The easiest way we’ve found of doing this is by placing mannequins every two spaces by using a pattern in your Custom Designs app, as they can be picked up easily for quicker cleanup.

Weeds and flowers don’t count as an object, so make sure you set a design down next to them, too. It’s a tedious job, but it works, and is well worth the effort for the end result.

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Using mannequins is the easiest way.

Once everywhere is blocked off, you can either wait until the next day to see where a new rock has spawned, or you can time travel forward if you’re impatient. It’ll take six days for all of them to appear, and could be longer if you’ve accidentally missed a spot – we did say it was tedious.

At the end of it, you should have yourself your very own rock garden that you can decorate however you like.

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