Revolutionary Animal Crossing Update: Say Goodbye to Endless Frustration

The island customization options in Animal Crossing: New Horizons are considered to be one of the best new features added to the series. This includes the ability to place furniture outdoors, terraform the landscape according to the player's preferences, and choose the placement of buildings such as shops and villager homes. These additions have made Animal Crossing: New Horizons the most extensive sandbox experience in the series so far. However, despite these exciting features, there are certain issues that need to be addressed in the next Animal Crossing game, particularly in relation to a major construction annoyance that caused frustration for many players.

To facilitate island customization, players can use the Nook Phone's Island Designer App, which allows them to terraform their island. This app can be unlocked by purchasing it with Nook Miles at the Nook Stop. One of the features of the Island Designer App is the ability to place paths around the island, enhancing the overall design and creating a cozy atmosphere. While this concept is commendable, its execution could be improved as it currently leaves too much room for error and accidentally removes paths that could be reworked in future games.

Animal Crossing Needs to Make it Harder to Accidentally Remove Paths

In previous Animal Crossing games, players had to go through a lengthy process to create custom paths. They had to design each tile at the Able Sisters and then place them individually on the ground, navigating through various menus. This was a tedious task, but Animal Crossing: New Horizons introduced the Island Designer App, which greatly simplified the process. Now, players can choose from preset paths like wood planks, terra-cotta tiles, and cobblestone, or use their custom designs with this app. However, opening the app can be time-consuming, as it requires several confirmation screens.

The new method of placing paths is much more user-friendly and efficient. Players can now place multiple tiles at once, saving them the hassle of navigating through multiple menus. However, this new system brings a new issue - accidentally removing tiles. This happens because a single button is assigned to multiple actions. After placing a tile, pressing the "A" button again adds rounded edges to the tile. However, pressing the button a third time removes the tile completely. This often leads to unintentionally removing tiles while constructing a path.

In addition, there is a problem where preset tiles can only be removed in Island Designer mode, whereas custom pattern tiles can be removed outside of the mode by pressing the "Y" button with the Island Designer App. However, this button is also used for picking up other items such as fruit or flowers in Animal Crossing. Consequently, players may mistakenly remove their custom paths while trying to pick up something else. This gives the impression that the game discourages the use of custom tiles for paths, as they are easily removable and inconvenient to put back.

To resolve this issue, the next Animal Crossing game should make all path tiles unremovable unless the player is in the designated design mode. Alternatively, the button mapping options could be changed to prevent accidental removal of tiles while in designing mode. Implementing either of these solutions would greatly reduce frustration when creating custom paths, which makes it puzzling why such systems were not initially included.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available for Nintendo Switch.