Villagers

= my island BFFs!

Nov 20

Sparro

Island opp

Dec 31

Marcel

Dec 26

Pashmina

July 31

Grizzly

Dating Cookie

Feb 17

Dobie

Vivian's grandfather

Reneigh's BFF

Jan 26

Vivian

Dobie's granddaughter

Hooked up with Vesta

Jun 4

Reneigh

Dobie's BFF

Jun 18

Cookie

Dating Grizzly

Bea's ex

May 19

Olaf

Oblivious to the island drama

Apr 16

Vesta

Crush on Pashmina

Hooked up with Vivian

former villagers:

About the island

DA-8938-6247-6810

Julep was my second island! It is themed after Yosemite Valley, a national park in California. I grew up very near Yosemite and would camp there every summer, so it is a special place to me that I thought would be fun to recreate!!

It was a special challenge trying to represent a real place from real life in Animal Crossing, since I would obviously have to take creative liberties with my limited tools & map, but it was a lot of fun!! Above is a side-by-side map of the layout I tried to emulate on a smaller scale. Yosemite Valley is of course much larger than the island will permit so the map is cropped to just the section of the valley I recreated.

The shopping district & neighborhood inspired by Curry Village

In real life, Curry Village is a tent cabin village with a central shopping area. Gonna be honest, I look a lot of liberties here and it didn't really come out looking very much like the real life Curry Village, but I really like this area of my island so we'll let it slide. If I could redo this island, I would have put the retail in Yosemite Villageand made Curry Village smaller, but it's Animal Crossing so I work with what I've got.

This area is home to Vivian, Pashmina, Vesta, and Sparro!

Yosemite Village

Yosemite Village is real life is a little neighborhood where the visitor's center and general store are located. My one big mistake with this island is that I should have made Yosemite Village bigger and put retail here, but I was uncompromising on the size of my meadow and had to work around Resident Services being closer to center than I ultimately wanted, so I really had to squeeze this space in and make do with what I had. Ultimately, it's a nice enough neighborhood.

This area is home to Reneigh and Cookie.

View of Half Dome from the meadow boardwalk!!

My house is based on the real-life Ahwahnee Hotel, surrounded by meadows which are super common in Yosemite and so pretty. And down below the meadow is Grizzly's home, whose placement is inspired by real life employee housing.

Going up, we reach the campground, which is a combo of the 3 Pines campgrounds in Yosemite. My family would always stay in North Pines Campground and there is an actual little field of purple heather in the woods up there, so I planted a ton of purple hyacinths and as homage that only I will understand.

I also included the hiking trail to Vernal Falls, which is better known as the Mist Trail and is a super fun hike if you're ever in the area.

Hiking trails & Mirror Lake

Finally, up above everything is Mirror Lake! This area is home to Dobie, Olaf and Marcel. There aren't any houses by Mirror Lake in real life but I liked the variety in the layout and felt like the island was more dynamic with villagers living more spaced out, so I took creative liberties.

Despite having Julep as my island for twice as long as Honeydew (four years!!! holy shit!!), it does not feel quite as near and dear to me as Honeydew does. I think that has to do with the fact that even though I've had Julep for longer, I've probably played on it less because in the past four years I just have not played Animal Crossing as frequently. When I had Honeydew I played almost every single day for 2 years (shoutout pandemic), but on Julep I would go months at a time without playing. I skipped a lot of the major holidays & birthdays this way.

Also I went into Julep with an exact vision of what I wanted the design to be from the start, and I think that caused me to skip over a lot of the casual play and discovery parts of the game that I experienced with Honeydew. I haven't had nearly as many villagers because I settled on the ones I liked and rarely swapped them out for the purpose of variety & change, like I did on Honeydew.

I will miss this island. I nominate Vesta to be Resident Representative in my absence.