Once you unlock terraforming and start improving your Animal Crossing: New Horizons island, the next natural step is getting a 5-star island ranking. Do you have any trouble getting all 5 stars for your Animal Crossing: New Horizons? Here are some tips and tricks to guide your there!

Related Read: How To Unlock Terraforming In Animal Crossing New Horizons - ACNH Terraforming Guide

ACNH 5 Star Island Rating Guide

So you want a perfect five-star town in Animal Crossing New Horizons, you've come to the right place as we managed to raise our own island to those vaunted heights while some of the specifics on how to achieve a five-star rating island in ACNH recently came out via data mine, it's actually not as informative as you might think, so we're here to help you figure out what it takes to get that coveted achievement (how to raise your island rating to 5 star in ACNH). Hope these tips got you started on your road to 5 stars!

How To Get 5 Star Island On Animal Crossing: New Horizons

When it comes to your island rating, there's actually a lot going on behind the scenes, the rating is made up of two important factors: development and scenery development is all about the buildings in your town as well as pre-made furniture scenery. On the other hand, it not only includes plants and trees but DIY furniture as well. To improve your ACNH island rating to 5 stars, you're going to want to focus on both of these aspects in equal measure, there's no way to actually see the exact points yourself in each category though, Isabelle will give you advice on how to improve both, so it's incredibly important to take her feedback to heart.

1. Recruit New Villagers

The development on the island can't begin if you have fewer than 8 villagers living in your Town, this is the only way to get yourself at the very least to two stars. You have two main options to find and recruit villagers: visiting a mystery island using a Nook Miles Ticket or inviting an NPC who visits your campsite.

2. Add Lots Of Furniture To Your Island

Adding in as much furniture as possible. Expensive Animal Crossing items are likely to give you more points, as are items bought off the Nook Miles shopping system. You can find more furniture to decorate your island at Nook's store, in balloons that float overhead, via finding more DIY recipes and through your friends. Placing furniture is important but you should be able to easily move around freely as well, so make sure to avoid filling up more than 45 spaces in an 8 by 8 block with furniture, otherwise the game will consider it clutter and penalize you, but this only counts for furniture and doesn't take anything else into services, meaning you can pack trees closely together if that's the look you're going for. 

3. Build Bridges And Incline 

With the arrival of tools like the pole and ladder items, you might think that you can safely ignore bridges and inclines. But if you do that you'll be missing out on a massive in the Development Department, because every object that makes traversing the island easier for your villagers is rewarded by the game and is multiplied by the amount on your Island. It doesn't matter which bridge or staircase you build and whether it was the cheapest or the most expensive, the game only cares that they exist at all, so get building those bridges and incline.

4. Plant A Certain Amount Of Flowers & Trees

Beyond filling your island with decorations and furnishings, you'll need to cultivate the flora. Trees and adult flowers also count towards scenery in the exact same way, each gives you one point towards scenery making flowers. The most effective option obviously trees are important too, though Animal Crossing New Horizons prefers you to have no more than 190 trees in total on your island. There's no such cap on the amount of flowers making it easy to rack up points fast, so buy a bunch of seeds from Nook's cranny and go to town. 

5. Make Use Of The DIY Recipes

When making and placing DIY furniture across town, variety is the name of the game. Placing the exact same benches tables and chairs everywhere won't really get you far unless you customize them, that is by using customization kits and painting each piece of duplicate furniture a different color, the game will actually count it as being unique, the idea is not only to create variety by using most of your DIY recipes but also the colors available to them in customization, this way you can rack up points in your quest for 5-star scenery. There's a similar system in place for pre-made furniture under the development segment though it works a little bit differently, it takes the total of different furniture types into services. Before analyzing your score, getting over 10 will net you the results you need in the long run. 

6. Using Stalls To Place ACNH Items

In addition, the price is a huge consideration as well. If an item is worth over 20,000 ACNH bells in total, you'll earn more points for the effort. If you drop more than 15 ACNH items around your island, the game will consider that a mess. So if you want to display items to be shared, consider using stalls to place the items instead, because as long as they're on a surface raised off the ground, they won't be considered glitter and don't worry natural resources such as fallen tree branches and shells do not count. 

7. Add Lots Of Fences To Your Island

There are some quick ways to increase development points without doing much of anything for one. Use fences to make your town even nicer for some extra points. You can build fences around just about anything, including your home, residents' houses and your island stores. Secondly, make sure to pull weeds for some extra help.

What Happens When You Achieve A 5-Star Island Rating?

- Gain a recipe from Isabelle for a Golden Watering Can. This is the only golden tool that can be obtained via achieving ACNH 5 star island rating, and unlike other tools, it has one very important property: It can be used to water Black Roses for a chance that the parent flowers may spawn special Golden Roses - which cannot be obtained any other way.

- Lily of the Valley flowers will begin blooming around the cliffs on your island.