# How to force Rocks to spawn where you want them



## Banananaki (Apr 24, 2020)

(Posting this here because it got deleted on reddit for a reason I have no idea. Just wanted to help people out idk)

I recently figured out how to force rocks to spawn exactly where you want, and I figured I'd share my observations.

Here is a summary.


Rocks do not spawn 1 square from water, cliff edges or bases, beach ramps (where grass meets the beach), or near major buildings (houses, shops, museum, plaza).
Rocks do not spawn in the surrounding squares of trees, bushes, stumps, bamboo, or other items (not 100% on items).
Rocks do not spawn if the square is occupied by anything already. Flowers, dropped items, placed items, randomly dropped sticks/stones, anything. The square needs to be grass, or dirt (or sand, confirmed in comments) (side note, palm trees CAN grow on placed sand, inland, which I thought was pretty cool to share)
An extension of the trees, it seems they do not spawn in a 4x3 area of the tree. That is, the front 3 squares in front of the tree, the two squares on either side of the tree, and a 2x3 area behind the tree. Not 100% confirmed, but it seems like that is the case. Generally if you have an obstructed view of the square with either camera configuration, it is likely that it cannot spawn there.
My process, was that I made this design surrounding 6 spots for rocks to spawn. The ground is non-shovel-able, which prevents anything that can be shoveled from spawning on it (rocks, fossil dig spots, trees, flowers, etc.) I placed dark dirt in each square that the rocks spawned in, just to give it some character, it is not necessary. You can see the little bit of brown on the edges, so it just looks a little fancier.

I have been time traveling a lot anyway, just letting flowers grow rampantly whenever it rains, spreading them out, etc. I noticed just recently, that even after it rained, NO more flowers were spawning, so I assumed I hit the limit on flowers. This led me to pull the trigger on my forced rock spawn project, to make this little mine. I personally like this setup in a hexagonal fashion, because you have a wall to prevent knockback from missing hits, and you can do 3 at a time, pick em up, then do the other 3 pretty quickly.

So once I had flowers everywhere, I started experimenting. I had noticed some of the places rocks never spawn already, so I used that to start moving flowers away from cliff edges, water edges, houses, landmarks, etc. I shifted a few items to half blocks, to extend the squares it was occupying (example, a 1x1 item can block 4 squares if you place them in the center of the 4 squares). Essentially the entire perimeter of any cliff, river, beach, house, pond, was empty. Every 1 or 2 block wide area was made empty, and a 3 block wide path would have 1 row of flowers in the middle of it.

As I time traveled, I learned more about how they spawn, and every time a rock spawned, I looked at the environment around it, and blocked it off with more flowers. Obviously managing like 800 flowers, 50-60 trees, and everything else on the island, I missed a few spots.

If you have any questions, I'll do my best to answer them. Hopefully this helps someone! I might add or edit some stuff later, including a video showing some of my layout.

TL;DR if you want rocks to spawn in certain spots, follow steps 1-4, and hope you didn't miss a spot. Good luck!

Here's a video of a portion of my town that will NOT spawn any rocks. Anywhere in this video is an example of no-rock areas.


----------



## Mayor-of-Bliss (Apr 24, 2020)

Oh neat this is very helpful thanks for the info! I'm trying to get my rocks in better places at least.


----------



## Jhine7 (Apr 24, 2020)

To sum up your findings, the rocks just need a 3x3 space to spawn. Also, only 3 rocks can spawn in an acre. So make sure the rocks are near an acre border if you want all 6 next to each other. I did this recently but covering my entire town in brick paths, except for the spots for the rocks to go. Good work!


----------



## Believe (Apr 24, 2020)

This is giving me plot resetting flashbacks where you had to put a path down on every spot except these spawn in almost every spot possible and not a 3x3 square and the island is like 3x bigger than new leaf


----------



## Rosie Moon (Apr 24, 2020)

Can confirm the rocks can spawn on non-beach sand, as I’ve been attempting to get my rocks to spawn on sand and one popped up this morning!


----------



## ForbiddenSecrets (Apr 24, 2020)

I used custom paths when I did this so I could just kick them away later. They can also be placed on my dirt paths and erased without hurting the paths below which was nice. Rocks found some sneaky places to spawn so I had some false starts haha

Will also confirm sand. I used the sand for my rock garden


----------



## Banananaki (Apr 24, 2020)

Can confirm more than 3 rocks in an acre, all of mine are in B3. I believe the trees can count as 4x3 instead, but yeah basically 3x3.
I could have used custom paths, but I was going to use the flowers anyway so I will just clean out whatever I don't use, or offer people to come steal some. Was also a plan to have some hybrids try to spawn naturally during the massive overgrowing I let happen lol. I knew at some point I was going to force rocks to spawn somewhere, but once I wasn't getting a single flower to multiply anymore, I said OK, it's time.

Good to know about the sand, I'll update the post. Going to try to get some other screenshots and a short clip of some examples that didn't allow rock spawns.


----------



## Lars (Apr 24, 2020)

i though once you started your island the rock just has a certain space and you can't do anything about it.
do they move in this game?
how can you make them move around?


----------



## Aardbei (Apr 24, 2020)

Lars said:


> i though once you started your island the rock just has a certain space and you can't do anything about it.
> do they move in this game?
> how can you make them move around?



You have to eat a fruit and hit the rock ! It will break and the folling day a new rock will spawn elsewhere. 

But be aware that only one rock spawn per day, so if you break more than one rock you will have to wait some days to see them all respawn


----------



## Banananaki (Apr 24, 2020)

Aardbei said:


> You have to eat a fruit and hit the rock ! It will break and the folling day a new rock will spawn elsewhere.
> 
> But be aware that only one rock spawn per day, so if you break more than one rock you will have to wait some days to see them all respawn


Right. Especially early game, it sucks breaking rocks. If you do, you have to go to the island to farm iron for your shop. I learned the hard way because I ate a fruit, and saw a counter show up. So I told myself "Huh, what happens if I fill this up? Let's find out" then later I went to hit a rock and it broke.
Haven't tried it, but I hear you can get rid of those hulk smash fruit charges by sitting on a toilet.


----------



## fawn182 (May 16, 2020)

thank you so much for this info! i was implementing the mannequin method but it was slowing down my game and my switch was working too hard and heating up, i was afraid it was going to crash!

after reading all of this, i realized a LOT of my island already cannot spawn rocks! this helped me a bunch


----------

