There’s a breadth of ways to play Animal Crossing: New Horizons - you can decide to focus on customizing your island, spend all your days fishing, or try to rack up as many Bells as possible. Although New Horizons does encourage you to complete certain milestones, it doesn’t penalize you if you take a different approach to the game.

Related: Animal Crossing: The Best Cranky Villagers

If you’ve already played for hundreds of hours, and are looking for a new way to enjoy island life, you can try out some unconventional playstyles to give the game a new lease of life. Perhaps you could forgo going to mystery islands or terraform in a unique way - the options are almost endless.

10 Give Villagers Ugly Clothing

via fadeintothevoid on Reddit

Luckily, if you’re not a fan of a villager’s default clothing, you can give them new clothes to wear. Alternatively, you could give them even worse clothing to give you a laugh whenever you see them around the island.

For example, you could give your villagers the instant-muscles suit to make it seem as though they have abs. Or, give them the bath-towel wrap to make every day spa day. It works especially well if the item contrasts the villager’s aesthetic - who ever imagined a hamster with well-defined muscles?

9 Don’t Donate To Blathers

Once Blathers has set up his tent on your island, you’re under no obligation to visit this scholarly owl. In fact, you can pocket any fauna that you can capture, either making your own personal museum or making money off them by selling to Nook’s Cranny or Flick and C.J.

Though you’ll never get the fully realized museum, it does have the benefit of keeping Blathers’ tent, which has its own charm, being similar to an archeology site. If you’re not a fan of fishing, bug catching, or collecting art, it’s easy to avoid donating to Blathers at all.

8 Only Invite One Animal Species

With over 300 villagers to invite to your island, having different villager species is encouraged; however, if you favor a particular type, there’s no penalty to having your villagers all be the same animal.

Related: Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Ways To Decorate Your Island's Entrance

Each species has different personalities and appearances within it, so your island won’t be too repetitive, and you can still have some variety. As long as you don’t pick octopuses, that is, as there are only four in the game. It’s a fun way to show off your love for a particular animal - you could even use the theme to decorate your island. For example, a cat island filled with cat towers.

7 Make Your Island A Lake

Though Nintendo likely envisioned terraforming as a way to enhance your island, it can be used in other ways, too. If a few rivers and ponds aren’t enough, you can expand the water’s territory to cover almost the entire island.

Think Pacifidlog Town from the Hoenn region in Pokemon, with each building on its own separate platform and connecting walkways between them all. It would make the island feel like a seaside town, which is fitting considering New Horizons’ island getaway theme. All that would be missing is a fresh seafood restaurant.

6 Live Off The Land

Though New Horizons sees you move to a deserted island, there are certain amenities that you can use, including a general store and clothing shop. If you’re especially committed to living the natural life, you can skip making purchases and instead harvest materials to craft everything you use.

This approach would make you more in touch with island life, as you’ll need to make everything yourself, including the furniture you decorate the island and your home with. There’s no need for Bells when you’ve got everything you need on the island itself.

5 Don’t Go Villager Hunting

A large part of the Animal Crossing community loved villager hunting, spending hundreds of Nook Miles Tickets to find their desired villagers. While searching for specific villagers to fill out your roster can be exciting, it’s also fun to let the housing plots fill in automatically.

Related: Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Best Catchphrase Ideas

This makes the game play out more like previous iterations, where you had little control over who moved into your town. It adds an element of mystery to filling out your island and makes you more likely to befriend other villagers that you aren’t so familiar with. Who knows, maybe you’ll find your new favorite villager.

4 Make The Worst Happy Home Paradise Roommate Combinations

In New Horizons’ DLC, Happy Home Paradise, you can pair up villagers to live together as roommates and decorate their homes for them. While it’s easy to pick villagers who have similar aesthetics and would be likely to get along, you could mix things up by choosing unlikely combinations.

A Snooty villager like Whitney being roommates with a Lazy villager like Zucker would certainly make for an interesting pairing, especially when decorating their shared area to appeal to both of them. Whitney better be prepared to like bugs.

3 Make Your Island A Maze

When planning your island’s layout, you’ll usually want to make it as accessible as possible, allowing you and your villagers to move around and explore freely. However, it can be fun to go out of the box completely and make an island-sized maze to confuse your villagers and friends you invite to your island.

You could craft and use hedges similar to Rover’s May Day maze or use the Spooky Fence to give it a Halloween twist. If you’re dedicated enough, you could even use terraforming to create your desired maze. If a labyrinth is more your style, you could invite a bull villager to live in the center to stand in as a Minotaur.

2 Decorate With Unconventional Items

When picking what to decorate your island with, most people would gravitate towards aesthetically appealing items like the Garden Wagon or Lampposts. But, if you’re up for a challenge, you could use unconventional items - even the DIY recipes you make from trash can be put to good use.

Related: Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Best Greeting Ideas

The Tire Stack could be used to create a garage or a racetrack using the cars that were added in the 2.0 update. Or, if you’re going for realism, you could use the Trash Bags to emulate a city aesthetic. There are a lot of underused items that could work unexpectedly well in this way.

1 Never Pay Off Your Final Loan

Despite Tom Nook having garnered a reputation in the Animal Crossing community as a Bell-hungry tanuki, he is quite lenient when it comes to actually paying back the money that you owe him. Surprisingly, he gives you an unlimited amount of time to pay back your loan. If only it was that easy in real life.

The loan for your final house upgrade will set you back 2,498,000 Bells - that is if you decide to pay it at all. Tom Nook will give you the upgrade without you having to pay a single Bell, so you can swindle him out of the final payment. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to expand your storage further, but you’ll get to keep your Bells safely in your pocket.

Next: The Best Town Tunes In Animal Crossing: New Horizons