A list of Anti-Frustration Features in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
- Running through flowers will no longer kill them; instead it will simply strip away their petals and reduce them to buds, which will bloom again. The player is also no longer required to water flowers to keep them alive—watering now encourages flowers to propagate and potentially cross-pollinate for hybridized colors.
- Saplings do not die either. If you plant them in areas where they cannot properly grow—that is, in a place without enough space for an adult tree, or in the wrong soil—they will simply never grow larger and can be easily replanted in a better spot.
- Once you have a shovel, you can dig up buried clams, and finding your first one will teach you the Fish Bait recipe. This item allows you to force a fish shadow to appear wherever you toss it into the water, instead of waiting for them to appear organically. If you're looking for a particular fish, you can also continue tossing in bait until the desired fish size appears.
- Compared to earlier installments, the amount of negative emotions from villagers has been drastically reduced, making the game more relaxing to play. Villagers are far less likely to become angry or sad due to interactions with other villagers (and if they do, you can now cheer them up by talking to them), and in the absence of provocation, villagers are almost never upset at the player.
- In previous games, a villager who moved out left absolutely nothing behind, and a new house plot would be spawned in a random location for the next villager to arrive. Since New Horizons allows you to rearrange the buildings on the island, including resident homes, so you can fully plan your island, this is changed— villagers who move out leave behind their plot of land and it gets inherited by the next villager to move in, meaning changes of residents don't mess up the town layout at all.
- By the same merit, in previous games, if the town was full, villagers had a tendency to move away randomly without telling you, resulting in a lot of lost dream villagers outside the player's control. In New Horizons though, villagers will never move out without speaking to you first, thus giving you a lot more control over who you want to live on your island.
- The Welcome Amiibo update in New Leaf sort of mitigated this with the introduction of the Amiibo cards, however you still have to own the specific villager's card, and if you were to get them to move back in this way, their bond level with you would be reset to zero.
- Interior design is more robust thanks to an interface similar to Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer's, which temporarily removes the player character from the room and gives you a cursor to precisely place furniture and hang multiple objects on walls. The original method, where the player character rotates and pushes furniture into place by hand, is also still available.
- While at home, players can freely access the house storage with a button press, instead of needing to interact with "storage" furniture like a cabinet or dresser. The storage is presented as a proper catalog with thumbnail images of items, sorting options, and categorized tabs, instead of simply using the player character's information-poor inventory interface as in previous games. There is a storage limit, but it's much larger than previous games and increases with each addition to the house.
- For the night owls, you can still sell items after Nook's Cranny closes through an outdoor dropbox attached to the building. There are certainly downsides — the money doesn't arrive until the next day, a 20% service charge will be withheld, there is no hot item bonus, and you can't sell turnips this way. However, the value on the "IOU" receipt you receive from the dropbox is valid for Nook Miles+ selling goals. Of course, with this game's improved storage and ability to set furniture outside, you can easily store your items for later or leave them on the ground in front of the shop and sell them at full price once they open.
- In previous games, the player would have to manually extract new clothes from storage, put on each piece individually, and then return the previous outfit items to storage if they wanted that space in their inventory free. You'd also have to put on a clothing item or display it as furniture before knowing what it looked like. Here, interacting with a closet in or out of the house will offer the player a full catalog of their stored clothing. You can assemble an outfit and see what your character will look like before committing to a choice, and the previous outfit is automatically returned to storage. This game also introduces the wand tool, which can store a radial menu of eight full outfits that the player can change to on the fly. As well, almost every storage type unit (Including fridges and coolers) can be used to access clothing storage in order to change clothes or update wand outfits meaning that if a player has a cooler outside and they want to change, they can just go to it instead of going home to access their wardrobe for the same purpose.
- Traversal tools (ladder and vaulting pole) are unbreakable, and if the player does manage to get themselves stuck, they can be transported back to their house for a small amount of Nook Miles using the Rescue Service.note In a similar vein, if you ever get stuck or an item becomes inaccessible while Terrain Sculpting, you can call for cleanup, which removes any trees, fences, and other items in your vicinity to Resident Services' recycling bin.
- In previous games, the player character's facial features were determined by unrelated introductory questions at the beginning of the game and could never be changed. Hairstyles and color could be changed, but were similarly determined by answers to unrelated questions. Additionally, everyone started with the same pale skintone, which could be suntanned, but this had to be actively maintained and would never be dark enough to represent many players. Now, players can outright edit the face, skintone, and hair color and style of their Player Character at any time using a mirror.
- Grass doesn't deteriorate into dirt anymore; the new Island Editor NookPhone app allows you to place grass and dirt wherever you'd like. Additionally, you can still lay down patterns to create makeshift pavement as many players would in previous games, but the app now supports real paths and streets (and it also allows you to create paths with custom designs in a much simpler manner).
- The Critterpedia NookPhone app is much more in-depth than the encyclopedia from previous games, now giving you specific monthly and hourly info for each creature in addition to their habitat; it also tells you if you've donated it to the museum, sparing you from having to double-check with Blathers.
- Unlike most other resources which eventually hit a daily cap, branches can be shaken out of trees ad infinitum, meaning the player is always able to keep themselves supplied with basic tools.
- The Nook Stop awards the player an increasing number of Nook Miles for every day it's used in a row, capping at 300 for seven days and beyond. If the Nook Stop terminal is unavailable for a whole day, such as on the day the Resident Services building is under construction or New Year's Eve, the next day the system will simply assume you've visited at least seven days in a row regardless of your actual streak before the interruption and give 500 Nook Miles as compensation.
- Carrying over from New Leaf's Welcome amiibo update, you can now shake trees while holding a tool. Not only does this alleviate the need to put away equipment just to harvest fruit, it makes catching wasps a lot easier, since you can keep your net out and simply use it as soon as the nest hits the ground.
- Players can hop across one-space wide rivers and holes, should the need to traverse over them becomes necessary. Similarly, it's possible to sidle around half-space wide corners to get around (but not half-space wide walkways).
- It is possible to get to islands with one type of non-native fruit (dubbed the "sister fruit") on mystery tours, giving a bit of relief to those stuck in regions without the Nintendo Switch Online services.
- Even as you upgrade buildings, the plots of land don't change in size, meaning any objects, patterns, and landscape work around them won't be disturbed or need to be adjusted.
- With the new mechanic of DIY crafting, workbenches are made very accessible, with one always in Resident Services and in your villagers' homes, one always provided on a mystery island, and workbenches being craftable as furniture for yourself. In fact, the ability to place furniture outdoors makes it possible to set workbenches in several strategic locations or simply carry one in your inventory to use as needed.
- As annoying as it can be to have your tools break on you in the middle of doing something, the game is unexpectedly strict with most tools for what qualifies as a hit to a tool's durability or not. Fishing rods and nets only deteriorate after catching something no matter how much you swing them around otherwise, and will lose durability but never break while the timers for Fishing Tourneys or Bug-Offs are counting down. Shovels only lose durability after digging an item up (including trees) and hitting rocks, and shovels will not break while a rock's item-dispensing timer is running. Slingshots only deteriorate from actually hitting balloons; and watering cans only do when they water spaces which haven't already been watered.
- Previously, if you hadn't played for a long time, your character would come out of the house with a bedhead, overwriting the hair you had previously. This is no longer the case, as your character will fix it back to their original hairstyle after shaking off the drowsiness. This also permanently unlocks the bedhead hairstyle as a customization option, in case you want to keep it.
- If a villager tries to give you a gift but your pockets are full, you won't miss the opportunity at the gift like in previous games. Either the villager will give you time to free up space and come back for it later, or simply mail it to your house. Villagers will also wait for you to free up space if they try to give you a DIY but your pockets are full. You also won’t have to repeat the entire interaction with them when you go back and talk to them.
- In older games, returning a lost item was a bit of a crapshoot—you had no way of determining its owner, and each villager would simply say whether it was their or not without offering further help. In this game, if you examine a lost item in your inventory, your character might offer a short but helpful description—for example, you might have "an exercise journal that looks like it's gotten wet before", implying that it belongs to a jock. Even if you just get a vague "Someone lost this...", that means that it belongs to someone you don't have a high friendship with, which can still narrow it down. If the first villager you offer the lost item to was the wrong one, they'll outright tell you who the owner is.
- If a villager is present in a building that isn't their home (e.g. visiting another villager), interacting with that villager, then going into another building and interacting with an NPC inside will force said villager to teleport home. This makes finding that villager again easier.
- Stackable inventory items now get stacked automatically when they're picked up (although if the new items came from a present or were dug out of the ground, they won't automatically stack, mostly so bell trees can work the same as in previous games). This makes picking up items and inventory management much smoother.
- The Fishing Tourney and Bug-Off event has two conveniences: unbreakable fishing rods and bug nets so they don't hamper your catching time, and all of your catches are stored in a cooler or bug cage instead of your inventory, so you can't run out of space.
- When prizes are randomly given out, the game ensures you get at least one copy of every possible item they give out, culling the time sunk trying to get the last missing item you want, such as spending points for Fishing Tourney swag or Redd's Raffle in the Fireworks Festival.
- During Fireworks Festival hours, Redd will have a trash bin by his stand for you to discard any used fountain fireworks you get from the raffle, so you don't have to run to your house to trash them, set up one somewhere, or otherwise don't have one to use.
- Sick villagers don't stay in for too long now if you bring them their medicine. Previously, they would be in their house for three days minimum if the player was consistent with visits. Now they'll recover almost instantaneouslynote if given medicine, with the only lingering effect being them staying at home all day.
- Inviting a new villager via amiibo requires you to craft something for them. Should they ask for something you don't know how to make, they'll give you the DIY recipe for it.
- In previous games, villagers in an angry or sad state would be unable to speak with you for an extended period, locking you out of normal conversation options while they're in a mood. In this game, you can offer some encouragement and cheer them up, making it possible to open them up to conversation again.
- The Nature Day update which added Redd and Leif to the game made it much easier to acquire rare and desirable furniture and flowers, as the two respectively now sell these items, lessening the need to visit Mystery Tour islands to try and find them or hoping Nook's Cranny sells them that day. Redd also sells different color variations of items sold at Nooks Cranny. (Nook's Cranny only sells one color of an item and it will most likely not be customizable. Redd can sell an item in a different color variation from the one sold at Nook's Cranny).
- On the subject of Redd, when he first visits he will always sell you a genuine painting, so Blathers upgrading the museum isn't a Luck-Based Mission and you have a good start on the art wing. It's also much easier to snoop out fraud paintings once you visit his shop, as you now have the option zoom in on a piece of art before buying it so that you can look for any suspicious details. Some weeks even bless players with more than one genuine art piece, so you have a greater chance of collecting that missing piece in your collection.
- Once DIY recipes become available for sale at the Nook Stop machine, you can purchase them repeatedly, which can be good if you want to gift them to another player. The game will tell you if you've already bought it before, however, to prevent wasting Nook Miles when you thought you didn't already have the recipe. Similarly, if you try to purchase a recipe from Nook's Cranny that you already own, Timmy or Tommy will ask if you're sure you want it. For the multi-item digital catalogs, which don't give the player a card, they simply won't let you buy them more than once. Visiting players can buy them, though, giving people who just started the game a leg up early on.
- Normally, Rescue Services works as a way to warp the player out of a bad situation without having to restart the game. While on a special Nook Miles island, such as the May Day maze island, Rescue Services will also reset the island to its base state so that the player can retry it if they locked themselves out of rewards.
- If you have a sidequest that requires delivering an item to a villager (catch requested critter, deliver gift, return lost item), the first interaction with said villager will result in them standing up if they are seated, allowing them to accept the item.
- Once you set your wand outfits, they are carried across all wands no matter how they were obtained, meaning you won’t have to store and reset outfits in another wand if you want to carry around a different one.
- In view of the increased opportunities to send gifts to villagers, the way gifting affects villager friendship levels has been greatly simplified. Villagers no longer have disliked styles to worry about. Favoured styles and colours only affect the bonus for gifting clothing. Gifting any furniture item gives the maximum direct bonus to friendship.
- Watering a solitary flower can encourage a duplicate to spawn in an adjacent space. This can help you obtain a second rare hybrid flower (after painstakingly breeding the first one), with which you can begin breeding larger quantities of them. Furthermore, a flower that has not bred will have a progressively increased chance of breeding with every passing day that it does not breed.
- Villager delivery quests will always select a recipient villager that is in their home. In addition, if the quest is given late in the day, the deadline is extended to the next day.
- Despite the much-maligned mechanic of variation-locked furniture colors and Nook's Cranny only ever selling one variation of any piece of catalogue furniture, an island's Nook's Cranny will always offer the same variation for every piece of furniture in a set. Thus, if you have seen a blue Diner Chair in your Nook's Cranny, you will eventually see the rest of the blue Diner Set appear in your Nook's Cranny. This ensures that a player can get a full set of said furniture without being forced to trade.
- 1.3.0 stealthily changed Sahara's interactions slightly, looping back to the first list of options, on the assumption that you still want to buy more of her wares. This makes buying her entire selection smoother and quicker.
- While Halloween furniture is intended to be crafted using DIY recipes, most Halloween furniture will appear in Nook's Cranny in the seasonal furniture slot. Thus, even if you have bad luck with getting the Halloween DIY recipes that you're looking for, you still have a chance to obtain a copy of the item.
- In previous games, if you refuse to give Jack or the villagers candy, they'd trick you by replacing your current outfit or an item in your pocket with a Jack-in-the-box or "shabby" items like a patched shirt or old flooring, which could be a big source of Paranoia Fuel for players not willing to part ways with anything they have on-hand. This time around, tricks consist solely of chancing your skin and eye color to a custom spooky design, which can easily be changed back with a vanity. If you for some reason don’t have a vanity on your island, a villager will give you one as a gift and explain to you how to use it.
- Jack and villagers no longer force a conversation with you when they spot you during Halloween. Villagers will simply act identically to when they have a message to deliver (i.e. displaying the surprise reaction, running up, and hovering around while using the joy reaction) and can be completely ignored, with the player free to walk away from them, and Jack can only be interacted with if you directly come up to him and initiate a conversation. This saves a lot of stress from being sighted during Halloween while trying to take care of other activities, and gives much greater agency over how you participate in Halloween compared to before.
- Candy is required to receive the special rewards from Jack as well as any DIY recipes or Halloween themed items you didn’t obtain before Halloween. While candy can only be bought from Nooks Cranny once per day, on Halloween day itself, villagers inside of their house will give the player free candy each time they visit so long as they’re wearing a costume. Even part of a costume such as spooky headwear counts. The player can also get candy from dressing as Jack after he gives them his costume and spooking the villagers.
- The Turkey Day event contained a surprising amount of such features:
- Villagers not in the plaza would be cooking in their homes. Interacting with them triggered a sidequest to find an ingredient they were looking for, and they would trade it for an ingredient required for one of the Turkey Day dishes. They would also give a hint as to a "secret ingredient" required to enhance the Turkey Day dishes.
- While the main way to obtain the Turkey Day DIY recipes is to fully complete the Turkey Day questline (all four dishes prepared and enhanced with their "secret ingredient"), the Turkey Day DIY recipe pack can also be obtained after the event at Nook's Cranny, providing respite to those who could not finish the questline.
- Similar to the Halloween event, a random Turkey Day item would also be sold in Nook's Cranny in the seasonal slot until December arrived.
- Toy Day also included more than a few of these:
- Compared to New Leaf, the event questline was massively simplified. The New Leaf Toy Day questline was particularly involved, requiring both a Luck-Based Mission of getting hints from your villagers in regular dialogue over the month of December and the Guide Dang It! element of figuring out what specific item in Jingle's bag the "color" and "type" hints referred to, which could complicate things if multiple villagers asked for items that fit identical categories (e.g. one villager asking for a refrigerator and another a cream couch, both of which are only described as "white furniture"). This time, all you need to do is craft three sheets of Festive Wrapping Paper for Jingle, then interact with every villager on your island once— no gift identification required.
- Similarly, the process of obtaining Jingle's photo was made much easier. In New Leaf, it required getting every single gift in Jingle's bag to the correct villager. In New Horizons, it is obtained simply by obtaining the "Toy Day stockings" item from Jingles after crafting the Festive Wrapping Paper for him, hanging the "Toy Day stockings" in the player's house, and then interacting with it the next day (or any time before January 1).
- After completing the main questline, players could give each of their villagers a wrapped item as part of a "gift exchange". This ensured that the player retained their chance to give their villagers a daily gift, despite it being an event day.
- During the "gift exchange", villagers will return presents, which will always contain Toy Day toys. Unlike what is sold in Nook's Cranny, these are not variation-locked, allowing the player to access more variations of the toys without needing to trade with another player.
- After failing an invite attempt with a random campsite villager (turned down or losing the card game), the game will significantly increase the probability that a subsequent conversation with the random camper will provide an opportunity to invite the camper.
- To successfully invite an amiibo camper to live on your island, you need to invite them to the campsite for three days and fulfil their crafting request within each day. Contrary to popular belief, those three days need not be consecutive. Notably, this allows an amiibo which has been scanned twice to be used as a means of immediately kicking an unwanted villager or arranging a trade.
- The Festivale event introduced a mechanic where the Festivale event items could be customised using rainbow feathers, allowing players to access different variants of the event items without the hassle of trading.
- The Version 2.0 update brings back the first game's morning aerobics feature as "group stretching", with some minor modifications. Originally, group aerobics could only be done at certain times of the year, from 6 AM to 7 AM. And if you wanted to have your own session at any time, you would have to earn the aerobics radio by attending all 14 of the summer sessions. In New Horizons, group stretching can be initiated right from the get go in front of Town Hall, at any time you desire.
- The different moves you can do in morning aerobics are done with the control stick, but the last time they featured, you would have to talk to Copper to learn how to do specific moves and pray that you have them memorized so you could sync up with the others. Here, a step-by-step guide is provided during gameplay, making it much easier to move in sync with the group.
- In Happy Home Paradise, after purchasing a certain amount of items, Wardell will unlock the option to order items through him in a matter similar to what Nook's Shopping offers. However, unlike Nook's Shopping, he offers every non-craftable item the player used to decorate the villagers' homes, which gives the players easier access to the items that were added to the 2.0 update as well as older items they hadn't previously obtained. The only downside is that the items cost Poki rather than Bells, though this is a non-issue for those who play the downloadable content regularly, especially as your salary rises.
- After spending an amount of Poki, if the player is short on Poki, Wardell gives the player the option to buy items they previously couldn't afford and pay for it later if they're short. There is no time frame in which they need to pay off the item, and they can gradually pay it off over time if need be. This service, however, is only limited to one item.
- 2.0 adds the Storage Sheds, which can be set up outdoors to gain access to your home storage, meaning you won't have to return home to put things away and can set up a shed near an outdoor workbench or kitchen to quickly grab crafting or cooking supplies.
- Similar to the above, Tortimer's function in the Harv's Island commune is one you have to do a little work for, but setting him up and getting access to home storage on Harv's Island makes the other services offered at the commune more convenient as you can store their wares right away, or, for Reese and Cyrus, pull furniture out of storage to get customized without having to fill your pockets for the trip.
