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In this guide, we will be showing you how to make a two-tiered waterfall with terraforming, as well as go over everything you need to know in order to make double level waterfall yourself on your own island.
We will briefly go over how to unlock terraforming and some terraforming basics before jumping into how to make the two-tiered waterfalls.
1. Unlocking Terraforming
Creating waterfalls in Animal Crossing New Horizons requires you to have unlocked the terraforming ability first:
Once your island has a three-star rating for the first time and you talk to Isabelle about your island evaluation, K.K slider will visit your island and perform a concert.
The next day Tom Nook will appear outside your house and give you the Terraforming App on your Nook Phone.
Once you have the island designer App, you will only be able to make grass in dirt paths, you then have to buy the ability to terraform cliffs and water from the kiosk and resident services. The cliff construction permit is used to make and destroy cliffs and costs 6 000 nook miles. Cliffs are crucial for making waterfalls as the water needs something to fall over, the waterscaping permit is used to make rivers, ponds and waterfalls, and cost 6000 miles as well.
Once you purchase both of these permits, you will see in your terraforming app the options to make cliffs and to make water.
2. Terraforming Basics
Before you can make a waterfall, you need to make some clips for the water to fall over. There are some basic rules you need to adhere to when terraforming.
It is also important to note terraforming is a grid system which can help when trying to make cliffs and water features a specific size, you can create a one by one cliff but that doesn't do much for us, a two by one and a three by one cliff are also not useful, since you need at least a 3x2 cliff for a waterfall. The game requires you to have land around a waterfall, so that the water is held in place by something.
Once you have a three by two cliff you can use the waterscape shovel to make a one by one waterfall in the middle. As long as there is one tile of land surrounding the water, you can make a waterfall. Lots of terraforming is trial and error so we recommend playing around with the cliff and waterscape shovels to really learn how this mechanic works.
3. Making A 2 Tired Waterfall
Now that we went over the basics of a one-tier waterfall, we can start on our two-tiered waterfall. For this, we need to build a two-story cliff:
For cliffs, the game requires a one by one land buffer around the third story of cliffs. This means the smallest two-tiered cliff we can create is a three by three bottom cliff with a one by one top cliff, this is much too small to make waterfalls on since waterfalls need to be surrounded by land to hold it in place. Thus the smallest two-tiered cliffs we can use for making waterfalls is a four by five cliff on the bottom and a three by two cliff on the top.
From here we can make a one by one waterfall on the top cliff and the bottom cliff to create our first two-tiered waterfall, now from here you can expand the land to the left and right of both levels of cliffs to make an even longer two-tiered waterfall.
You can also make two-tiered waterfall that face sideways by making a cliff that goes north to south and then adding the water to the left or to the right side of the cliffs.
You can then start to get fancy and have waterfalls going down all sides of a cliff, but remembering to keep a one by one piece of land to hold the water in place.
If you try to add water somewhere that is not allowed, the game simply won't let you, this way you don't have to worry about accidentally flooding your island.
Terraforming can get overwhelming, but just have fun with it, you can always undo what you have built if you don't like it or it doesn't fit on your island, that is the beauty of terraforming, nothing is permanent and you can use the tools to transform the layout of your island as many times as you like.
