Addicted to Animal Crossing!

February 2, 2022

Addicted to Animal Crossing

By Victoria Ward

Do you have a game that you can’t put down? Do you have a game that you play way too much and feel the need to hide the true number of hours you’ve played? Well, for me that is Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Nintendo Switch. I started playing on December 26th, 2020, when my brothers bought me the game for Christmas. I have played it every day since then, and since then, my daily hours of playing have grown exponential. I have been spellbound by the idea of decorating an island to fit your personality, unearthing what the ground has to offer, dressing up for any event your island hosts, hosting your friends for those events, and going beyond your island to find what lies across the sea. If you’re not already addicted to Animal Crossing, I apologize, you might be by the end of this article.

Here are my top 5 reasons why I love playing Animal Crossing:

1. Decorating!

Getting Started:

The first reason why I love Animal Crossing is decorating! You begin the game by choosing the original design for your island. Tom Nook, the owner of Resident Services and the creator of the getaway package. Next, you pick a spot for your tent, make tools, and start the enriching process of your new island. It is true that you don’t start with a lot of belles or nook miles, which you can also trade in for goodies. After fishing, finding fossils to sell, and picking who your first three villagers are, the fun of decorating your tent, soon to be a house, and the whole of your island really begins. Bugs, fish, fossils, and gyroids, oh my! You collect, sell, with the grind to expand your house, pay off loans to Tom Nook, and buy or make new furniture for your house. It’s all worth it when the hours you put into decorating your island pay off to make a beautiful living space for you and your villagers.

Making/ Buying Items:

You can buy a few items from Nook’s Cranny, run by Timmy and Tommy. In order to get Nook’s Cranny to open on your island you have to build the Museum first. Using materials like wood, iron, and rock, you can make tools from the DIY recipes from Tom Nook.

These DIY or do it yourself plans give you more freedom to build furniture like beds, dressers, side tables and more to make your dwelling place look beautiful. The more furniture you add also makes your space feel more personal to how you like to decorate.

There are a few tasks that Tom Nook will ask you to complete before the entirety of the game is revealed including upgrading and meeting Nook’s assistant Isabelle. For those who haven’t played Animal Crossing: New Horizons or haven’t had the chance to pick the game up yet, I will reserve some information to be personally discovered by you. I can’t give out all the secrets of the game. Once you start earning belles, the currency of the game, you unlock the ability to buy items and place them around your dwelling.

Visitors:

In the category of decorating, there are a few characters that visit your island who buy and sell items to spruce up your island and your home (did you catch the tree joke?). Sahara, a camel, comes to your island selling rugs to help furnish your home. She offers small, medium, and large rugs for purchase. There is also a mystery rug option if you want Sahara to pick a rug for you. Depending on the size rug you buy, Sahara will give you tickets that can ease the number of belles used to buy a rug later. If you think about it, this concept sounds like lay-away at Walmart.

Leif, a sloth who loves flowers, comes to your island to sell plants that add more beauty to your island. You can also sell weeds from around your island to Leif for 20 belles a clump. For those of you just starting your game, saving up the weeds you find will help boost the speed you make belles later in the game. With the addition of an array of flowers, bushes, and fruit trees, you can also eventually gain the access to changing the landscape of your island and the waterways. This action is one of the later unlocks for the game but getting to this point is worth it to have a beautiful island where your friends and villagers can enjoy playing together.

Can you see why there is an addictive quality by playing AC? Decorating is one of the most fun elements of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, because your inner creativity comes out in picking furniture for your house, growing flowers, veggies, or fruit, growing your museum collection, which will be in the next section, and just having fun making a creation that is all your own. Now, we get to some of the items you can find around your island!

2. Collecting Fossils, Bugs, Fish, Art, and Gyroids!

One secret I will tell you is that this game is not as easy as it looks, but it’s entertaining! In the Animal Crossing community, the long task of scavenging for fish and other items to sell is called grinding. You could spend hours just running around catching fish, bugs, and searching for fossils and gyroids. I have done this, and it is surprisingly therapeutic.

Museum:

Building the Museum is the first opportunity to add a new facility to your island. You can sell all of these things for belles, or you can take them to the museum to add the items to your collection. Blathers, the owner of the museum, will take the donations of fish, bugs, and fossils. He will create exhibits for you. After completing certain tasks, an art gallery will open, and with the new 2021 updates, there is now a coffee shop, as additions to your museum. It is run by Blather’s brother Brewster. A word of advice, if Brewster asks if you want pigeon milk in your coffee, say no, nobody knows where it comes from.

More Visitors:

Visitors come to the island to buy and sell items to help you make more belles and decorate your island more! Flick comes to the island to buy your bugs. A few times a year there is a bug catching competition where catching more bugs earns you more bells and other bug related prizes.

C.J. is the guy to talk to about fish. His backstory is that he has a social media account where he talks about fish. When he comes to your island, he will ask you for three specific types of fish, and he will reward you for your service. C.J. will also buy any fish that you have for more belles that selling them at Nook’s Cranny would buy them for.

Redd, a suspicious fox who sells art out of his old trolley boat on the backside of the island. In order to gain access to Redd’s boat, you have to talk with him when he comes to your island; then he will ask if you want to look at art on the boat. Don’t worry, he isn’t going to try kidnapping you, but he will try and sell you fake art, so be careful. A sure way to make sure the art isn’t a fake is to research the differences between the real and the fake art. This makes deciding if a piece of art is worth buying and helping your museum’s art gallery grow quicker.

The last, and coolest, villager that will come to your island is K.K. Slider, a rock and roll dog, only after your island reaches a 3-star rating by planting more vegetation, building, and placing objects. He will show up on Saturdays, and at 6pm where you are, he will do a concert!

Fossils, Gyroids & Money Bags:

You can collect fossils in the ground; six will appear each day with the symbol of a star wherever they are buried. They can be collected, assessed by Blathers, and added to your museum. After completing all the fossils, they can still be assessed, by Blathers, and sold at Nook’s Cranny. Other items that can be found in the ground include gyroids and money bags.

The gyroids appear in the ground with a star like the fossils. Gyroids can be placed anywhere outside or inside. The money bags glow in the ground; they contain 1,000 belles.

3. Dressing Up

The next category of Animal Crossing that brings the addictive quality to Animal Crossing is the ability to dress your avatar with cute clothing, accessories, and style. You can also change your avatar’s hair style to match whichever style you choose to create. You may ask, where do we buy these clothes?

After opening the Museum and Nook’s Cranny, you then have the opportunity to open Ables Sisters Boutique. This store is run by Mable and Sable, who are very excited to expand their store to your island. In this boutique you can find fashion that fits your style, create your own designs from a design app in your phone, and share them in the store.

I spend a lot of belles here every day, because in real life, I don’t have much of a fashion sense, but for some reason in Animal Crossing I like giving my avatar a makeover multiple times a day. Maybe I feel this way because I have more options to choose from, and the clothes look flattering on the fake body I have in game compared to my real body?

Mable and Sable have a third sister, Label, who is a traveling fashion seeking character. She will offer you a piece of clothing that represents a theme. recreate a new outfit that matches the theme of the piece she gave you and return to her. When you return, Label will assess your outfit and reward your style with a piece of Label merch from her fashion line. It is so fun to dress up, visit Able Sisters, and talk to Label about style; it’s another way to decorate your island by making yourself look amazing!

But guess what? There is one more person that comes to the island to sell clothing. Kicks, a sweet-smelling skunk, sells shoes and backpacks. He is another great source for buying clothing to add to your collection! Have fun dressing up; let your inner creative spark come to life!

4. Playing with Friends

So, from all the information above, you might agree that this game really is addictive. There is an abundance of fun that you can do in Animal Crossing: New Horizons by yourself, but what is there to do outside of your island? How can you interact with your friends in this online and virtual world?

The first thing you should know about playing with others on Animal Crossing: New Horizons is that you need a Nintendo Online Membership. In order to fully experience services like flying to a friend's island, allowing friends to visit your island, dreaming, and access to the new 2022 DLC. The membership costs $19.99 for a whole year. You can set up your account to automatically purchase a year later from when you originally bought it. Buying the Nintendo Online Membership makes the game more expansive and worth the great price.

Next, you can become best friends with the people you know. For safety reasons, I wouldn’t recommend adding people to your friends lists that you don’t know personally. Once you and your pals are best friends, and you have the online membership, you and your friends can freely travel between each other's islands. You can enjoy each other’s company, and you can share ideas about ways to decorate.

Dreaming is one of the simplest things you can do while playing Animal Crossing. With the Nintendo online deal, you can hop into any bed on your island, click the’ I want to dream’ bubble, and you will be transported into your dreams. Ask your friends for their dream code or the name of their island and you will be able to go to their island without having to use the airport. Unfortunately, while you are dreaming on another person’s island, anything you pick up will not return with you when you wake up. Like human beings, the AC avatars cannot create objects from their mind. However, you can still gain inspiration for what you want your island to look like by viewing what other players have done, and just enjoy exploring islands!

Finally, you can play with your real-life friends, but you can also hang out with your villagers on and off your island. You can have up to 10 villagers on your island and there are many that can be on your island. You can also find villagers on some of the islands you fly or take the boat to.

5. Traveling/ Happy Paradise Homes DLC

The final category and reason I love Animal Crossing is traveling beyond my island. There are two modes of transportation that can take you to different islands outside your own. The first is the airport, run by Orville and Wilbur Dodo, where you can travel to mystery islands with the use of Nook Miles. The airport is also the way point for inviting friends over by opening the gate access point. You can also fly to Harv’s island or Paradise Home Planning once you have the Nintendo Online Membership.

The second service is the boat service at the dock run by Kapp’n; he is a sea shanty singing frog! Kapp’n can also take you to other islands, but these will most likely have more foliage that is rarer to find.

As I mentioned above, Paradise Home Planning, the new DLC (downloadable content), is the next level way of combining decorating, dressing up, meeting new villagers, meeting new characters, and letting your imagination soar! PHP is run by Lottie and her assistants Niko and Wardell. The DLC cost $24.99, and I think it is worth it because it gives you more challenges to complete after ‘finishing’ the ones from your original island. PHP is also a great way to expand your knowledge of interior designing.

The best part is that you don’t have to pay for any of the items you use; the catalog is completely open to whatever you want to decorate a space. After finishing a few vacation homes, you unlock a few DIY recipes to use on your island, and eventually, you will be able to redecorate your villagers’ home.

Final Thoughts:

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a very addicting game due to all the wonderful things you can do in the game. It’s not like a game where you fight a bad guy or have a straight goal, but you do have the opportunity to build on an island that is yours alone is fun. The calm yet chaotically creative atmosphere is so addicting! Have you become addicted yet?

By Victoria Ward