Town Story ~ Autumn to Winter

Hey~ Do you remember this?
(Do you remember me? 😛 I’m Teru…)

I am finally back from hiatus (again, for now) and just finished going through the 4000 or so pictures of the past 5 months and reduced them to a reasonable number . But they would still be such a mess if I just posted them chronologically that instead I’m splitting them into categories and putting one category in each post, starting with this post about how my town itself has been doing.

Somewhere along the line I’ll also post about my recent trip to Japan, which was AWESOME ^_^ Also, sorry for not being around to read and comment on everybody else’s posts over the past couple of months! 😕 I promise I will be getting to doing that in the next few days x3

Warning that there will be a TON of pictures of my town in this post. You can skip to the bottom if you get bored 😛

So to start off… you might remember (or not) that we left off in the last post about my town with an incoming 10th villager, who demolished some trees and special stump and also took the location of the future windmill.

Aaand yes, it did turn out to be Boomer from my old Arcadia. I couldn’t stay mad at him because I liked him quite a bit.

To be honest, his house actually looked quite nice in this spot, and I also liked the way it peeked out from between the trees when you were in the plaza, especially when you could see smoke rising from its chimney.
As you can probably tell from the use of past tense though 😛 , he did move away in the end.

Enjoying my [then] new lighthouse in different settings.

The heavy rains and thunderstorms sure are a sight in New Leaf.

Not the best picture to show it, but I’m glad to say that Julian and Renée’s houses there moved away in the end, freeing up the space in front of the space in front of my house. Can’t get enough space xD

I’ve heard differing opinions about it, but I loved the new green that came on toward the end of summer! It made everything feel so fresh and in my opinion fit into the palette of the rest of the town more nicely than the darker green from before.

… That dark green, lol.

New scribble.

Frrreeesh! 😀

I loooved the colours at sunset x3

The way the new green glowed in the moonlight was kinda weird though 😛

The red flowers lining my plaza look so much more vibrant now.

Not sure this colour change felt as natural as the others, but it was cool.

My very first red+ rose ^_^ Now they’re all over the place.

I realised I was down to the final missing piece of the dinosaur exhibit earlier than I expected, and it was from the seismosaur, making it the last incomplete fossil just like in the movie

The missing piece turned up soon afterwards 😀 Hooray.

Was this called the Autumn Moon festival? The veggie basket from Isabelle on this day is pretty much the only decent exclusive item Europe gets over the US. Not happy 😡

Taking advantage of the meteor showers 🙂 This is the bridge north of the plaza. I didn’t really like how flat the opposite bank was, but it certainly made for a good viewing spot for fireworks and shooting stars.

Hahaha, some flower silliness 😀 I was hitting this yellow tulip in a test to see how many times it took to destroy it with the bug net. Well I got to about 50 hits with my villagers watching nearby, and up came Deirdre and watered the poor thing T^T I couldn’t continue hitting it after that x3
Also I have a feeling flowers are invincible to the bug net, lol 😆

Enjoying the plaza with villagers I like.

Chip’s tent in my plaza is much more bearable than Nat’s in my opinion.

Sitting under my tree again and then…

Bam, I finally realise that it’s grown a whole stage 😆

I didn’t notice for four days xD

And then three days later…

… It shrunk again -.-

Oh well, it was nice knowing you, big tree.

A week or so after the map yellowed for autumn, I got a crazy red sunset 😮

I had experienced the same sort of sunset at the island before, so I just thought it was seasonal autumn thing.

I figured the two hydrangea bushes I planted north of the plaza bridge weren’t going to bloom anytime soon, and decided trees would better frame the headland, anyway. I also changed the flowers to try to match the reddening autumn colours better.

Oh uh… yeah, that is totally the spot, Isabelle.

In addition to the trees, I also tried to balance out the rock that sits on the right after crossing the bridge.

I put a water pump opposite the rock 😆

Before this I actually tried putting a stone tablet here, but when it was finished it actually looked pretty bad. It was too big and had a green tinge to it, not complementing the area or the other rock at all.

The lilies still looked messy so later on I replaced them with roses. To be honest, the purple and blue violets might have done best after all. As much as I was looking forward to the warm hues of autumn, once it set in all the red flowers in my town were quite overwhelming.

At first it didn’t seem like I was going to get the Emporium anytime soon, but I got really lucky with Gracie visits toward the end and got it well in time for winter.

Experimenting with crossing purple and black roses, the combination needed in Wild World to breed blue roses. Ten out of ten of the offspring were red -_-

After Boomer moved and Deirdre made the sensible request, I was able to put the windmill in its rightful place in my town, in the corner northeast of the plaza 😀

I usually pay things off on the day, but since this was a long-term plan, I was happy to pay it off over a few days, paying in denominations of 100,000. It was great to see how much the villagers pitched in in the mean time, more than a thousand Bells per day 🙂

My poor tree became naked D:

Pausing to enjoy the first snow
These are the four wisteria trellises I’ve built between my station and cafe to repel villager houses, as well as to be a bit of a feature where I can display some flowers. Here I am breeding red+ roses in the centre in hopes to get a blue rose.

A sorely-needed bridge linking the two banks in the upper-right part of town. This is the area I’m hoping to start letting villagers move into, while I clear up the bottom area along the cliff and beach. It’s going to be an ambitious project that will use up all my 30 PWPs and also eventually make me lose Baabara, who is my favourite resident.

Me, me and Olaf xD

Naughty-or-Nice Day, (allow me to vent again) is the ONLY Europe-exclusive holiday??? What in the HELL, Nintendo?!! 😡

Anyhoo… back to the post, and my last day before the Japan trip…

I got a blue rose! From my cast-off red roses 😯 😯 😯

I line my town with red roses, and 9 or so of these roses were ones that were offspring of the red+ roses I was trying to get blue roses with. Because I wasn’t sure 2nd-generation red roses from red+ roses still counted as red+, I used them as regular red roses instead to border my town. Well, guess I was wrong xP

Of course the huddle of 1st gen red+ roses in my actual breeding area that I watered and fertilised carefully didn’t yield a single blue -_-

On the day I left for Japan, the snow started sticking! It looked sooo nice.

Aaand…

I got a second blue rose!! Two blue roses in two days O_O I suppose the second one was easier since one parent was blue.

The hedged area outside my house. These are all red+ roses I originally tried breeding blue roses with, by the way. They just never gave me anything blue…

This is how the hedge looked before the holly got covered by snow. I hope I get to see how it looks on green grass after the snow melts.

The path from the plaza bridge. I really wish the winter got its purple trees again, like in Wild World… In New Leaf it’s like the fall never fully relinquishes its hold, and then transitions straight into a murky green colour in the onset of spring 😕

Patches of snow on the wisteria trellis ^_^ Actually the wisteria in our garden loses all of its leaves and flowers in winter… I guess it’s good the seasons in AC aren’t completely realistic.

Noticing the fairy lights in the fir trees 😀

The plaza looked really unflattering all through the first half of winter, but now with some green replacing the dry brown from before, there’s a bit more reason to sit down and take a picture 🙂

OH, I also just noticed again in the pic that my tree grew while it was ‘dead’ xD It took me days to realise it in-game as well. One day I decided to see if the two dried leaves that had miraculously hung to the town tree’s bare branches all through winter had magically turned green along with the rest of the smaller trees, and when I got there there were three dried leaves instead of two xD Then I realised the whole dang tree was bigger 😆

I keep showing you the northern side of this bridge; now here’s the plaza side.

This was much better than the flat nothingness that used to lie on the other side. I would plant a 3rd tree on either side, but funnily enough there’s just not enough place on both sides, one side because of the cliff, the other because of the streetlamp.

Left of the bridge is the little area with the waterfall.

Right of the bridge are lots of trees 😆 Then further right is the windmill.

Sigh… I’ve been hit with this conundrum too. I don’t understand what the rule is for building near the plaza. Further up along the straight edge the usual 2-space allowance is fine. Perhaps confusion only arises around the corners? I was trying to build a wisteria trellis.

Along the bottom of town, a fair bit of space has been freed up, with Savannah, Peggy and Papi all moving out. This thoroughfare felt a bit narrow with so many residences along it.

Instead I am encouraging villagers to move into the upper-right quarter of town. At the back in this picture lives Phoebe, whom I got from Amy in December and will show more pictures of later, and the down the front is where my newest villager Moe is planning to move in.

FINALLY, I get to see my first aurora!! Even though I played regularly during the month in Japan, I only played long enough to go about my daily business, checking on neighbours and shops. When I got back, I was still busy with other things and didn’t play as much, so by the end of January I was pretty much resigned to the fact that seeing the northern lights would very likely have to be part of next year’s to-do list.

Then one night I came back from the island with a good evening’s haul and bam, there was the aurora

It’s beautiful T___T

A couple nights later, it showed up again ^_^

So that’s about it for how my town has gone since the beginning of autumn… which isn’t particularly far, but at the least that’s how it changed with the seasons 🙂 In the next post I’ll show you around my house and surrounds ^_^ (Don’t expect it to be much, though; it’s still a mess!)

Now for a little extra…

As I mentioned before, I have a particularly ambitious plan PWP-wise going on in my town… It basically involves putting PWPs up everywhere (in as tasteful a manner as I can manage) across town to ‘guide’ villager houses, and will eventually take up all 30 PWPs. It even involves demolishing some smaller projects I have now in order to be more resourceful.

Well… since I haven’t started replacing any of those smaller PWPs (mostly streetlamps) and have only been adding on more, I did a count and found out I am currently AT THIRTY PWPs. With this new surprising fact, I went to see if Isabelle had any different dialogue when I tried to build something new, and well… everything was exactly the same as always o_o

My town currently had 30 PWPs in it (not counting the cafe or other establishments), and yet Isabelle calmly and happily accepted my request to build a new wisteria trellis. She was letting me build a 31st PWP.

Sooo we went on a walk together in a video and counted, again. Apologies for the shakiness; I wasn’t able to set up a camera or 3ds stand.

I really don’t think I miscounted anything, and I even counted 30 on the map Isabelle brings up for demolition. My best guess is that one of my brick bridges is being mistaken for the original bridge? Or perhaps something changed with the bridge rule (initial bridge doesn’t count unless you replace it) in a patch? Or is there something that doesn’t count toward the limit that I don’t know about and accidentally counted?

Unfortunately I don’t want to build that wisteria trellis just yet because Kody’s house is in the way, but once he moves I will be trying to build that 31st project again!