The options for island customization are one of the best new featuresAnimal Crossing: New Horizonsadded to the series. Being able to place furniture outside, terraform the landscape to the player’s liking, and choose where buildings like shops and villager homes could be placed helpedAnimal Crossing: New Horizonsfeel like the biggest sandbox experience in the series to date. However, these new features were not without their own set of issues, and the nextAnimal Crossinggame should address one major construction annoyance that served as a point of frustration for many players.
The Nook Phone’s Island Designer App is the method by which players can terraform their island and is unlocked by purchasing withNook Miles via the Nook Stop. One of the features of the Island Designer App inAnimal Crossing: New Horizonslets players place paths around their island to add a layer of detail and coziness to their island’s design. While this feature is excellent in concept, its execution could be better as there is too much room for error and accidentally removing paths that could be reworked in a future game.
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Animal Crossing Needs to Make it Harder to Accidentally Remove Paths
Historically, if a player wanted to create apath in pastAnimal Crossingtitles, they had to make a custom design at the Able Sisters and then place each individual design tile on the ground one by one, going back and forth through a series of menus. This was a very tedious task that was greatly streamlined inAnimal Crossing: New Horizonsthrough the introduction of the Island Designer App. Not only could players now place preset paths like wood planks, terra-cotta tiles, and cobblestone, but custom designs could still be placed using this same app, though booting up the app can be somewhat time-consuming as it requires several confirmation screens to use.
The method for placing these paths is a lot more user-friendly as well as efficient since players can place multiple tiles at a time without having to go through a bunch of menus like they had to in the past when placingAnimal Crossing’s custom patternson the ground. However, this system also introduces a new problem with accidentally removing tiles of a path due to how a single button is mapped to multiple actions. After laying down a tile, players can press the “A” button again to give the tile rounded edges, but pressing the button a third time removes the tile entirely which makes accidentally removing a tile while building a path all too common.
To make matters worse, while the preset tiles can only be removed while in Island Designer mode, custom pattern tiles can be removed outside using the Island Designer App by pressing the “Y” button to pick them up. This is the same button for picking up other items, so players can easily mistakenly pick up a custom path they’ve placed while trying to pick up another item likeAnimal Crossing’s fruitor flowers. As a result, it feels like the game discourages the use of custom tiles for paths since they are so easy to remove and somewhat of a hassle to put back.
to fix this issue, thenextAnimal Crossinggameshould make all path tiles unable to be removed unless the player is in the designated design mode. Another option is to change the button mapping options so that players can’t accidentally remove tiles while in designing mode by simply pressing the button too many times. Both of these solutions are quite simple and would make creating custom paths so much less frustrating, which makes it all the more strange why one of these systems wasn’t implemented in the first place.
Animal Crossing: New Horizonsis available for Nintendo Switch.
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