Tomodachi Life Gets Animal Crossing-Style Island Customization & Custom Designs

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Fans of Animal Crossing’s terraforming and island design controls are in for a treat in the Tomodachi Life sequel!

While Tomodachi Life is closer to The Sims than Animal Crossing in terms of gameplay, the latest Nintendo Direct for Living the Dream showcased some amazing new features that are sure to be a hit for Animal Crossing island designers.

Island Decorating & Terraforming

When the game was first revealed, we heard some critiques about how the island design seemed oddly boring and basic with little depth. It turns out there was a reason for this — Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream has some very extensive controls for designing and decorating the island, just like in Animal Crossing: New Horizons!

At the Quik Build shop, players can buy all sorts of decoration items including benches, fences, trees, bushes, flowers, campfires, umbrellas, vending machines, and more. Then you can place them on the island from an overview grid.

Reminiscent of Animal Crossing, the island’s terrain can even be expanded by ‘painting’ areas of the ocean grid into land. We can see ‘grass’ as a land type in the top right in this section, implying that many different land types including sand, snow, autumn leaves, concrete, and asphalt will be available to work with.

All of the island’s buildings, including shops and homes of your Mii characters, can be freely moved around or rotated as well.

We don’t have every detail yet on the exact limitations of this feature, but the example screenshots of various island designs shared by Nintendo below really demonstrate how far you can go:

Custom Design Items, Pets, Houses, and Grounds

Taking customization to the next level, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream lets you create custom designs at the Palette House shop for your Mii characters to interact with.

There are different categories of designs that Miis can use, which each determine how they’ll interact with your creations. Some of the categories shown off by Nintendo include:

• Pets that follow your Miis around, like a dog.
• Food and drinks that your Miis consume, like a latte art coffee.
• Clothes that your Miis wear, including designs that glow at night.
• Television programs that your Miis can watch in their homes.

You can also design custom patterns that are applied to a house’s exterior by customizing all four sides of the building. For houses in particular, this could be a game-changer for themed islands. Nintendo shared examples of gingerbread houses, European buildings, and even a neon Japanese city street!

You can also use custom designs to change and theme the ground of your island, which will be great when used in conjunction with the house designs.

Between the custom items, houses, and ground designs, Tomodachi Life might just end up beating Animal Crossing: New Horizons for capabilities to create a completely unique themed island!

Non-Binary Gender Options

One more notable piece of news from the Direct worth mentioning is the addition of a non-binary gender option when creating a Mii in Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream.

You can also select a Mii’s dating preferences between the three gender options and pick any number of them, including multiple or none at all. This follows up on how the previous version of Tomodachi Life infamously only supported straight relationships.

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream releases on April 16th, 2026 for Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2 through backward compatibility. There is no dedicated Switch 2 Edition.

You can watch the complete Nintendo Direct showcasing all of the game’s features below:

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