I bit of both for me. They're in thematic neighborhoods, but some are scattered.
Butch is towards the left of my entrance by the beach in a woodland area. It made since for the cranky old dog to be off by himself. Really, my villagers can be put into two categories. Those who live in more wooded areas, decorated with country fencing and dark and orange wood furniture and those who live in areas mostly decorated with white birch.
They aren't in a grid system by any means (natural island), but a few villagers do live side by side, between 5-8 squares from each other. For the most part, houses are mixed throughout the map, except for the top right area of the map. When I had villagers who lived there, they rarely came out of their houses even though there were paths, bridges, and inclines.
Mine are scattered, but I do try to have it so that there’s at least two in one general area of the map (except for Clyde, who wound up by his lonesome behind Nook’s Cranny). It’s just the look I prefer from the older games, and since I don’t really terraform or anything having them all concentrated would leave me with a whole bunch of empty.
I set mine up like this (1x space apart horizontally, and 2x space apart vertically)
I am kind of regretting having them so close. I let my New Leaf greed for space influence me in this decision.
I able going to build a new neighborhood and give them all a little more space, and will also be separating them. I plan to have 6 on one side of the map, 3 in another area on the opposite side of the map, and the last house I plan to place in a secluded area, with a big yard somewhere else.
I have the same dilemma so I'm here lurking for inspiration :3
But I definitely plan on having them scattered, a grid-like neighborhood wouldn't work in my island. Even if I were to do a neighborhood I wouldn't place any fences and I would scatter them across three levels.
It took me a while to decide what to do too. I started terraforming a few days ago and decided to do a mix of both - I've spread my villagers out over two tiers, I've got a row of 4 on the second level, a row of 2 above them, and then on the ground level I have two sets of 2!
Here is my current map if it helps anyone. I terraformed very little and still have upper part of the island kind of bare. Who knows what it would look like in the future. tho I really like how I placed my villager houses. so might try to keep that.
I went with scattered as I like the natural look. I split my island into theme sections and put villagers in matching ones. I’m still working on it though lol.
I had them all focused in one place, two rows side by side
i hate it now and spent all day teraforming to change it
I STILL HATE IT LOL so im going back to the 2/2 format but placed around different places of my island and see if that helps
My neighborhood is almost finished and I am in love. I just got a bunch of streetlamps from someone here yesterday, and last night I kept walking through the neighborhood admiring its beauty. <3
I went with clusters. I have a main cluster with the shops and three houses, a big cluster with three houses and then two small clusters with two houses each. I spread these clusters around the island and have plans to theme them(downtown, ski/ mountain town, fairy village, and beach town. I don’t time travel and some of the furniture I want to decorate with is seasonal so it will probably be at least a year for everything to shape up. Lol.
I have four "neighborhoods," 3 live around my plaza area where my shops are, 2 live north of the river near my museum, 2 live near my campsite, and 3 more live up in the cliffs. It makes my map look very messy, with all the paths going everywhere, but I really like not having my villagers all in one spot, but still not having them in random places either.
At first I planned to have most of them scattered or by groups of 2-4, but I actually ended up grouping most of them as I terraformed the whole thing because I wanted more space (and also needed space to breed hybrids), so now I have about 6 of them together and the 4 others scattered around, mostly on the beaches.
I definitely fall in the mix of both camp. I don't really want specific neighborhoods with roads/sidewalks and whatnot but I did want my villagers mostly together. I decided to just keep most villagers to my southern central starting island where my resident services is, and then keep then northern portion of my island as a state park kind of thing
