The Island

Overview

Obviously I'm not going to be able to recreate all of Glitch in its entirety; the game world was MASSIVE, ecologically and artistically diverse, and some aspects of it, unfortunately, were not preserved in an easily accessible format. Here's an incomplete fan rendering of the world map by user acreditando, made by pasting region maps together. Warning: IT BIG.

That's not even counting the world map regions added close to the game's shutdown, such as the meditative underwater regions of Jal and Samudra, and the snowy, haunting regions Nottis and Drifa, OR the various quest, minigame, party, and other secret areas, which were never represented on the world or region maps. They even added a showcase area called the Vortex of Random to demonstrate ideas they'd had that never made it into formal game lore, but were polished enough to explore in part.

Like, I COULD theoretically try to make my island shaped like the in-game world map (which I have saved to my computer somewhere—I'll need to find it), or represent every single region equally, but I don't want to do that. After all, I've already linked to all the game assets and multiple remake projects if you just want a 1:1 recreation, or as close as anyone can get. Striving for that in ACNH just isn't functional.

So I'm going to be showcasing the things that stuck with me that I'm able to recreate, and do that as best I can. Some will be more difficult than others due to technical constraints, such as, in no particular order:

• caves and underground spaces
• floating objects
• heavily vertical areas
• universal flora palette (no cherry blossoms at the same time as autumn grass, for example)
• omnipresent soundtrack and limited diegetic audio options
• limited camera filtration
• and so on!

Existing Areas

Pictures will be added when I take/find them and remember to upload them.

Groddle

This region is kind of hard for me to design, honestly—it looks too much like Animal Crossing. Or, well, almost. The visual differences are things like floating dirt clods with flowers growing out of them, and I have no idea how I'd show that. If I could have three or four different types of flowering bush at once, I could really sell it, but that's not happening without hacking (which I don't want to do and also literally can't^{[note 1]}).

Enchanted Woods

One thing in Groddle I was confident about designing was the Enchanted Woods area, which is a tree so large it has trees growing inside it on mushroom shelves. I plan to add some mushroomy elements (no plantable mushroom shelves, alas) and perhaps expand it, but I think the base design is a fun concept.

Ix

Ix is named after a planet in Dune, and just like its literary origins, spice features heavily. Spice and gas plants cover the island, which is split into day and night halves. It's sparse, but the features it does have are jaunty and often geometrically complex.

In its original form, Ix and Groddle are separated by a physical drop, so Groddle has a street called The Great Hole to Ix and Ix has a corresponding Groddle Ladder. This is interesting, because they're treated as separate landmasses—perhaps there's a wormhole? Anyway, I used an incline to represent this, in the color that most closely resembled the giant staircase in Guillermo Gamera Way.

Ix has non-functional background buildings (rare for Glitch, where almost every building either is or was once navigable), which I've represented with dollhouses and doghouses. It also has two storekeepers, Helga and Uncle Friendly, who I've represented by the Able Sisters and Nook's Cranny respectively.

Fun fact: in actual Glitch, the day and night halves are west and east respectively, while on my island they're east and west. This is because I remembered that West Spice is one of the streets in the night zone... and forgot that East Spice is in the night zone, too. At this point, I like how it looks and don't want to change it.

Uralia

Obviously, I couldn't name my island after a region of Glitch without including its namesake! Uralia is a whimsical mountainous woodland island full of fantastical flora, fauna, and fungi! All the street names are Russian-themed in honor of (or because they were named by?) its Russian designer. This site's favicon is a cubimal (in-game wind-up toy) depiction of an Uralia street sprite, friendly NPCs that sell you tools, food, and other necessities.

I have the base area laid out (though I still need to do some reshaping), but I'm hoping items from the mush series, as well as other natural theme items, will help sell the vibe. It's a shame I can't drop mushrooms on a wild log bench.

Ilmenskie Caverns & Ilmenskie Deeps

Named for the real world Ilmensky Mountains, which are known for their precious and semiprecious stones, Ilmenskie is a region within a region... or rather, two regions underneath a third! The street in Uralia named Ilmenskie connects to Ilmenskie Caverns (as does another street, Eastern Approach), and at the lowest points of the Caverns, you enter Ilmenskie Deeps. They maintain some whimsical elements of Uralia, but with toned-down, stony decor more befitting a mine. Ilmenskie is a great place to mine rocks, which is energy-intensive, so the Meal Vendor (a mushroom fellow with a little cart) hangs around to sell energy-rich full meals.

This is the oldest structure placement on my island, not counting Resident Services. I realized I couldn't dig into the earth, but it might give the appearance of such if I built up the surrounding area in a ring. I planned out the structure on graph paper after flattening my island and spent like a week covering Uralia in mannequins to channel the rock spawns into my chosen area.

I have decorative stones and amber (one of the gems a player could rarely mine from a rock in Glitch) acting as decorations and backstops for digging. A cave at the back represents the Deeps. I plan to add a "meal vendor" and some of the new mining equipment. If you notice a Western-style stone, it's because when your energy hits zero in Glitch, you die, and that exact spot is marked with a gravestone that people can leave flowers on. This also serves as a respawn point. Since mining takes a lot of energy, it wasn't rare to see a grave or two in the Deeps.

Fun fact: in real life, mining in Ilmensky is now illegal, as it's within a nature preserve.

Mazza'la

This area is also called the Firebog, because the four regions of Mazza'la were inspired by peat bogs and are also very lightly on fire. They have different available resources than the rest of the map, including jellisacs (these jello grape-looking things), barnacles, and the aforementioned peat. Fireflies also live in the Firebog, of course.

A combination of the Festivale, Halloween, and bamboo series makes up most of the earthy, firey furniture aesthetic.

There's a garden area here to represent the community herb gardens from the original game. As of the 2.0 update, I've finally been able to plant vegetables there!

Jethimadh Tower

Roughly pronounced JAY-tee-mud (like the English word mud, yes). Named for जेठीमध, the root of the Glycyrrhiza glabra plant, AKA licorice. This is both a map region and home to Jethimadh Tower, a quest building I thought would be best represented by the Uralia Museum, which I nestled into a cliff and topped with pagodas.

An Autumn Day

This is a quest area that really stuck with me, which is fitting given its theme of slowing down and remembering the small moments. I have it behind Resident Services at the moment, because a raised area behind the plaza increases visibility of the ground. It's also useful for watching fireworks!

Planned/Work-in-Progress Areas

Andra

I plan to represent Andra with an area around Resident Services because Andra was home to a building conveniently called the "Bureau of Administrative Affairs Ministry of Departments," an aggressively bland building you'd have to wait in for a few quests. If you think Isabelle takes a while to get to the point, hoo boy.

I don't plan on representing the bureaucrats themselves, though, because their lizardy designs make me feel weird now that I'm older and know the disturbing implications of representing authorities as lizard-like. I don't think that was what they meant, but still...

Naraka (Hell)

Death in Glitch isn't the end of your game. Hell itself is a region to explore, and after serving your time, you can resurrect and return to the world of the living. There are even a few resources to be found in Naraka, like tomatoes^{[note 2]} and the ultra-rare Wine of the Dead, which can restore anything to life, or kill anything living.

It also houses Hell's Bartender, who has a very fun character design.

Game Concepts

Trants (Trees and Plants)

Large plants you can interact with in Glitch are called "trants," because some of them are literal trees and some are more nonspecific "plants." Some of these are quite easy to represent in ACNH! But there are some tradeoffs.

Fruit Trees

Easiest to represent: it's a tree that's pink and has dark bark. It's probably literally based off a sakura tree, just like the cherry blossoms in ACNH. So, if the island is in spring, they're automatically all over the place! I can even mimic their growth cycle with the cherry-blossom branches and cherry-blossom bonsai items.

Egg Plants

Ironically, I'm not using the Bunny Day Tree, a tree with eggs on it, to represent egg plants. The colorful nature of the eggs looks wrong for my purposes, as the egg plant's eggs are quite muted in color. (If only it were customizable to the different types of eggs!) Instead, I'll use the Spooky Tree because it'll better fit with the warm, earthy colors of the underground. Even if neither of them really resemble the egg plant, alas. Anyone who has a better idea, lmk.

Bubble Trees

It's covered in colorful orbs like a Bunny Day Tree but shaped like a cactus. So I suppose whichever I use will depend on the local vibe?

Spice Plant

Oh, this is easy. I just need to set the clock to the fall/winter boundary, when the trees are really dark! That'll solve every—wait. Didn't I say I needed it to be in spring for fruit trees? Hm. See, this is where the tradeoffs come in; I can't represent these both to my satisfaction without sacrificing something. Well, it's more possible to represent brown ground in spring/summer than green ground in fall, so I guess I might use an Evergreen Ash or Pine Tree for its shape?

Wood Tree

Literally, these most resemble the Decayed Tree (coloration) or the Frozen Tree (shape), but I'm conflicted because I want them to be functional. At the moment, I have them represented by evergreens.

Gas Plant

Okay, I still don't know how to represent these, but I literally just realized while writing the alt text that they're meant to look like lung cells. Because they collect gas. Learn something new every day!

Bean Tree

Paper Tree

Idk why exactly, but the Forsythia gives me strong vibes. If it were dead, it would most literally resemble the Decayed Tree.

Vendors and Street Sprites

On most streets, you'd find a vendor of some kind or another. Most were street sprites: little floating folks who would proffer various sets of similar goods, much like the special visitors of ACNH. A few areas had specialized vendors, like Ix and Naraka.

Small Touches

These are just little things that don't have a set home, but I want to include somewhere.

Dice

A d12 would be ideal, but a d6 will do.

Mailboxes

In Glitch, because the player was always moving, there often wasn't a set place they'd be to check their mail. So there were mailboxes scattered around the map. Luckily for me, mailboxes are movable in ACNH, so this should be easy to emulate!

Pi

Funnily enough, one Glitchy food item has been in ACNH for quite some time: namely, the pie with the mathematical symbol π on it that ACNH calls "π pie" and Glitch called "Pi".

Houses

Innes's House

The theme of this house is, for the most part, a house that I'd like to live in.

Galaxy's House

Named for my Glitch character; the owner is styled after them as well. This house's theme is areas or aspects of Glitch that can't be easily represented outside.

Tourist Services (planned)

This is my plan for a house mainly themed around indoor urban concepts like shops and offices. Some of the rooms are from Glitch; some aren't. Ideas are welcome for this one!

Vortex of Random (planned)

Rather than the actual VoR from Glitch, which was a collection of finished streets from unfinished areas, mine will be other media (mainly video games, with one exception that's mixed-media enough that it doesn't feel incongruous). This may grow into another house if I get overcome with the urge to create more, like Cozy Grove or Unpacking.

Probably Won't (or Can't) Be Implemented

I reserve the right to change my mind if I have more free space than expected or new features are added.

Umbra

Umbra is a really cool area of the game with abstract parallax effects, but I have tried to replicate it and it causes severe Moire flashing. I don't want to put something on my island that will give someone a seizure if they swing the camera too quickly, so if anything it'll be a video with a clear warning.

uutiif

uutiif is a location where you navigate by hopping from asteroid to asteroid as you look down on the planet below. Unfortunately, there isn't really a way to replicate this feeling well using the constraints of ACNH without devoting a lot of space (and, likely, custom pattern slots) to it.

Rainbow Run

This is difficult for an unusual reason: Rainbow Run is REALLY hard to find footage or screenshots of. I can't search the official Snaps library through normal means because the location tag feature is broken. I can't just try googling because the site isn't fully indexed for search engines, which I know because the one person who showed up as taking a snap of Rainbow Run took two and one wasn't indexed (not an intentional oversight as far as I can tell).

I don't have time to decompile the entire location archive tonight, but I'll look into it. Okay, I looked into it. Rainbow Run, as well as Snool and perhaps a few other streets, were made a completely different way than the other streets. Most streets are made of shared assets, sort of like digital Lego bricks—if you can make one, you can make all the others that use those pieces. But the streets I can't find are single images, which I guess in this metaphor would be a prebuilt dollhouse that can't be broken down and rebuilt like the Legos.

Essentially, I have all of Rainbow Run's data except what it looks like, so I can't recreate it. Mystery solved, I suppose?

1. [Back] Apparently some Switches, including mine, are currently unhackable, so it's moot. No judgement if you do as long as you're not screwing innocent people over, tho!
2. [Back] Mada Tamaha is a shadowy, bloody corridor in Hell. Or possibly a shadowy, tomatoey corridor in Hell. The game pauses to warn you very explicitly about the blood, but also tomatoes spawn there, so 🤷