13 Tomodachi Life Island Style Tips for Living the Dream

Living the Dream should mean living in style and with the island builder, you really can create the island of your dreams (or your Miis’, if you’re feeling considerate). However, considering your island is basically a blank slate, able to be completely leveled up and landscaped, it can be difficult to figure out how to arrange your Tomodachi Life island. Where should you put all game's the buildings? All the houses? That gigantic ferris wheel?

On top of arranging, there’s decorating. Not only does the game give you 61 decorative objects to work with, you can also make custom decorations at the Palette House. Your imagination is as much a limit as the lack of ideas.

So if you’re wondering how to design your island, here is some general advice and 13 style tips to get you started. 

Before You Style Your Tomodachi Life Island

Before you tear apart your island and embark on your quest to create a true island paradise, there are a few things to keep in mind. 

First and foremost, be aware that your island will get bigger the more Miis you add. After adding 8, 20, and 35 Miis, your island will expand. This is critical to plan for before you start rearranging, because the last thing you want is to create a dream layout with custom items that perfectly incorporates all the space you have with 24 Miis only for that to be ruined the moment you add your 25th Mii.

The best thing to do, then, is to not overhaul your island until you have 35 Miis and reach the maximum island size. If you don’t know every Mii you want on your island, you can always add placeholder Miis that you can delete later. (Is that heartless? Maybe. But sometimes sacrifices must be made in the name of art). 

To have all the decoration options available to you, you’ll need to level up your island and spend wishes to unlock all the decorative objects and the objects, interior/exterior, and landscaping categories at the Palette House. 

It’s also important to note that there is a decor maximum. It’s high, but you can reach a point where you cannot place any more objects. Once you start nearing that point, it has been reported that you will get a warning about the limit and a bar will pop up on the side of your screen indicating how close you are to maximum objects placed. So while filling out your island, make sure to be mindful and don’t be afraid to incorporate a little open space here and there. If anything, this maximum gives you a good excuse to reject your Miis’ decorating ideas.

Now, if you’re looking to trial run an island layout in the same way you might use the Living the Grid tool to create custom designs, there are a few online resources you can use. Redditor Sr_Lucart created a pretty simple Island Layout Planner, or there’s Tomodraft, which has a few more tools and options. 

Finally, check Reddit, Instagram, and other social media platforms for inspiration. It might kinda suck to look at all the well-developed islands (I’m with you there!), but browsing other people’s creative Living the Dream creations may spur your own and help you decide what you do or do not want your island to look like. 

13 Style Tips

1. Use Water for Organization and Design

Adding water features to your island can help organize it, give it some visual interest, and even create a sense of theme. You could use the ocean texture to turn your island into a chain of miniature islands. Or try making rivers or canals running through your island, with bridges running over them for your Miis to hang out on and traverse. Fake swimming pools, ponds, and docks are all ways to use water for more than just surrounding your island. 

That said, you can use the water texture to create puddles and tide pools on the beach texture to give your beach some extra definition. With the Palette House, you can create some other items like washed up seaweed or driftwood, starfish, or even a treasure chest to create a cove for your Miis to explore.

2. Incorporate Lots of Foliage

Nature never goes out of style! Having a healthy amount of trees, flowers, hedges, and yes, even weeds, gives a lot of life to your island. Adding a couple plots of flowers or weed sprouts to an empty grass area, or even a sparse beach, instantly makes the space more visually interesting and distinct. Trees and hedges help fill in empty space, and help give your Tomodachi Life island a more natural feel (especially considering some attract tiny butterflies that flutter around!). Plus, Miis can interact with trees and hedges and trigger silly cutscenes, spicing up the gameplay.

3. Give Your Custom Creations Special Effects

Considering the catalogue of decor is fairly small (especially when compared to a game like Animal Crossing), using the Palette house is basically a must if you want a really robustly decorated island. However, when you’re making your custom items—be it beach balls, mud puddles, stacks of gold bars, or whatever else you dream up and create—make sure to give them attributes. 

It depends on what you’re making, but you can give most custom creations different smells, textures, and auras. While most don’t add anything visually (you can give certain creations a finish such as Plasticky or Metallic that will), they provide more game play interactions as your Miis can have reactions based on the traits you’ve selected. Take, for example, a puddle of glowing goo I made stinky, creepy, and hot. My Miis did not like it! But the key is that it made the goo more than just a design on the floor. 

4. Shape Your Island

While putting decor on your Tomodachi Life Island is great for style, you can also make the island’s shape a part of the aesthetic. Avoid making your island a square—give it jagged edges, make a peninsula, or even make actual shapes like hearts, stars, or a bunch of geometric islands connected by bridges or beaches. 

6. Make Custom House Exteriors and Buildings

The default house designs are colorful and fun—and vary slightly on exterior decor depending on the personality—but an island full of them can get repetitive. Instead, try making your own house exteriors to bring some visual interest and/or work with your Tomodachi Life island’s theme (if you have one). 

You can also design house exteriors based on your Miis personalities or aesthetics, making it easy to distinguish who lives where. You could make uniform houses that all match for a clean look or have a lively mix of houses to maximize playfulness. 

Custom exteriors will also help you save space on some occasions, as the houses with multiple people take up a lot of room. With a custom exterior, don’t have to make them as big. That said, if you’re looking to make a gigantic castle or another kind of large structure, you can always design custom items like turrets as separate items and pair them with the actual house exterior to make a domineering building.   

You can also use the Palette House to make custom buildings that aren’t house-related to fill out the island. Try making a library, a museum, a campsite with tents, an outdoor movie theater, or even a food truck. For those with more macabre tastes, perhaps a graveyard and some ghosts are in order. No matter what you choose, adding places like these at least make it seem like your Miis can visit cooler places than the game’s regular haunts. Pretending is fun, right?

5. Spread Out Your Houses and Make Themed Neighborhoods

It may be tempting to cluster all of your houses together, but for aesthetic purposes, try creating a few different neighborhoods to spread your Miis out across your island. This strategy will balance out your island and allow you to create almost mini worlds. 

On that same note, try to style all of your neighborhoods with different aesthetics by using custom items and the preexisting objects. For example maybe you have a more beachy neighborhood full of tropical colors closer and palm trees to the ocean or some darker log cabins with conifer trees deeper into the island. Or maybe try creating neighborhoods based on color palettes or the flowers, like having each neighborhood designed around the sunflower, the lavender flower, the cosmos, etc. 

7. Create Locations Relevant to Mii Goods and Treasures

Your Miis have all these goods and treasures to play with, so why not make themed areas for them to use them at? For example, create a soccer field with custom field marker paths and goal objects, an outdoor painting studio with “references” or a good view, or a stage to play guitar or dance on. Will your Miis use their goods at these spots? Knowing their unwillingness to do anything I ask, no. But the areas will look cool and serve as fun points for storytelling. 

You could also try creating a pet store or specific kind of shop to make it seem like Miis are buying their pets and various treasures from the shops.

8. Give Buildings’ Surrounding Areas a Theme

Instead of lining up all your buildings and making a strip mall-style area, space out your buildings and give the surrounding a related decorative theme. For example, you could make a shady alley for the Marketplace, a farmer’s market to surround Fresh Kingdom Food Mart, or an outdoor patio area for your Tomoria Restaurant. 

You could set up custom photo opps like standees that Miis can put their heads through or stand in front of around Foto-Tomo photography (or around the island). Or you could create a fairground with the ferris wheel and the playground equipment. The whole idea is to work with the buildings, even if some of them aren’t as aesthetically pleasing as we might like (looking at you, My Treasures and your over the top flashiness), rather than against them. 

However, now would be a pretty good time to note that you can store any building. Of course, you won’t be able to use them. But if you’re committed to a certain style, you can totally disappear a building that doesn’t match.

9. Move Your Fountain

If you want to spice up your island, consider moving the fountain. While you might find its default location works well to anchor your island, it can be restrictive to try and design around it, especially if you have an island shape in mind. 

10. Avoid Car-based Designs

I see a lot of people designing roads and parking lots and car-based designs, and I’m here to remind you that your island paradise doesn’t have to match the real world! Ditch the cars and vehicles in favor of cobblestone, colorful tiles, golden bricks or custom paths. Embrace whimsy! 

11. Use Custom Objects to Create Ambiance

Sometimes it’s the small details that really make a design pop, and that’s certainly true for your Tomodachi Life Island. Hop over to the Palette House to create fireflies or little critters to dot your island (a racoon near the dumpsters, anyone?), glowing fairy lights using the illuminate option, fog clouds, or little drawings in the sand (which you can do not with custom paths but with the flat board in the objects category). You could put chalk drawings outside a house with kids, unique looking shells on the beach, or tree stumps near other trees. 

12. Choose a Seasonal Theme

You could make your island all typical green, but if you want to have a little fun with it, consider making an island based on a season. Try out a Winter Wonderland, filled with the winter seasonal items like snowmen, snow-covered conifer trees, and the snow landscaping path. Or opt for an autumnal forest full of orange and yellow trees and the fallen leaves path. You could even do a spooky, haunted island using Halloween decor and include custom ghost objects or gravestones, or embrace the color pink by using the spring items to make a cherry blossom-themed island. 

*Choosing any theme in general will help streamline the design process, giving you a vibe to work off of or a specific style to work towards.*

13. Don’t Rely Entirely on Custom Items

I know I’ve recommended a lot of uses for custom items, but you don’t want a Tomodachi Life island full of only custom items. They may look awesome and fill in some gaps left by the game’s decorative objects, but they aren’t as interactive as the game’s objects. Yes, they have reactions if you give items special traits, but that can’t fully replace what the game’s provided decor offers.

Miis can ride on the playground equipment, play in the sprinklers, sniff flowers, hallucinate while sitting at tables, and even mess with lamp posts. Some of the items trigger cutscenes, while others Miis can simply interact with in real time. Some decorations Miis can use together, like standing over the bonfire chatting or setting off fireworks together. 

So make sure to incorporate at least one of every item on your island for the sake of shaking up game play and being surprised by things that happen. That may be easier said than done when some of the items likely don’t fit your vibe, but the silly things that happen with the objects make having them worth it. 

At the end of the day, there’s no wrong way to make your island—these are just a few style tips to get you started. With the help of your imagination, and some skills with creating custom objects at the Palette House, you can create whatever kind of island you want. You can make a tropical paradise, an abandoned island, or even Antarctica. In the chaotic spirit of Living the Dream, go bold! Be creative! Get out there and create an island that will make your friends jealous.