People are hacking their Animal Crossing: New Leaf towns, and it’s beautiful

You can hack your town too!

Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Leaf came out in 2012 and is still pretty popular today. Its recent Welcome amiibo update breathed some fresh air into the adorable life sim, and many old players have logged into their towns after some time away.

New Leaf allows players to be mayor of a town they grow in real time. The residents? Anthropomorphic animals. The job? Developing the town and helping out villagers. The pastimes? Fishing, bug-catching, gardening, shopping, fossil-collecting, decorating, island mini games, aaand probably something else I’m forgetting.

But what’s gotten players most excited about their New Leaf towns recently is this: hacking.

A Save Editor made by Marc Robledo allows players to edit their towns and characters in ways the game won’t allow. For example, the mechanics of New Leaf don’t let players plant trees or flowers in rivers or ponds. With the Save Editor, you can spawn as many trees as you want anywhere in your town! Also, it’s a pain to have to demolish and rebuild Public Works Projects in order to move them. But in the Save Editor, you can move Projects, buildings, and, well, most anything else around in a flash.

Other cool things you can do in the Save Editor include changing each acre of your map, giving yourself unlimited bells (money), moving any villager in/ out, reviving all your grass, unlocking all Public Works Projects, changing your characters’ skin tone, spawning any item you want, and other things that are either impossible or time consuming in the regular game.

For many people, playing in real time and enjoying the daily activity aspect of New Leaf is the most enjoyable way to play. Lots of others find fun in designing a town without many limits and letting their creative juices flow without dealing with real time annoyances. The Save Editor facilitates this.

Some people use the Editor to design crazy awesome towns over time, and others use it briefly in order to get rid of some annoyances and revert to playing the game in real time.

Those who go all-out with town design have created some really great stuff. Take a look at the pictures below of areas that wouldn’t be possible without the Save Editor. Visit their dream towns too to get an up close and personal look!

Trees, bushes, and flowers can’t go in rivers. And trees can’t be that close to a cliff.

New Leaf won’t allow Public Works like that statute in rivers or on beaches normally.

Beaches normally can’t grow bushes, weeds, or trees besides palm trees.

The results of the Save Editor are awesome, but a lot of people wonder about its safety. The Editor’s How To Page warns against changing certain things to prevent glitching your game. Read it thoroughly before trying anything.

The method of getting your save file into the Save Editor is a whole other thing. Hacking has been around for a while in the New Leaf community, but Nintendo has patched hacking entry points in several 3DS updates.

The newest way of getting your save file out of your game works with all 3DS firmware versions, including the most recent update. You basically have to put a few files on your 3DS’s SD card and go into the 3DS applications those files create on your console. After that, your save file will be on your SD card to upload to the Save Editor for you to hack to your heart’s content.

Check out the video I made below on every step to getting your Animal Crossing: New Leaf save file out of your game and customizing it in the Save Editor.

Read everything in the description box and my pinned comment before trying anything.