That One Sidequest / Animal Crossing: New Horizons

• The new 100% Completion nightmare of this game is the fish and bug collectibles, model versions of the critters you can catch. You get them from C.J. or Flick when they visit the island, and while it costs no Bells, you have to give them three copies of the same fish/bug. This is fine for the common species, but gets more taxing for rarer creatures (have fun trying to find three Stringfish or Coelecanths before C.J. drops by, not including ones donated to the museum, sold, or used for home decoration). You can only get bug collectibles from Flick and fish collectibles from C.J., and each of them will show up maybe once every two weeks, maybe once each week if you get extremely lucky (as of Free Summer Update 1). Lastly, they only take one commission at a time; that's 80 visits for each one to complete the collection, if you prepare enough ahead of time. However, this number can be cut down if you have more then one resident on your island as they take one commission per resident whenever they show up.
• The "Nook Miles +" quests to find a specific bug or fish can become this if the Random Number God decides he hates you. It at least won't ask you to find a creature that's out of season, or not around at that time of day, but it can occasionally give you an obnoxiously rare species like jewel beetles or oarfish. The stinkbug one is deceptively difficult, since stinkbugs are relatively common but extremely well-camouflaged (and they fly away if you run near them), and the much more conspicuous man-faced stinkbug does not count. Tuna and blue marlin are even harder, since they're both fish that only appear very rarely near the pier.
• The robot hero is one of the toughest items to craft in the game, even though its recipe can be bought right after the community center is upgraded. It requires two other rare DIY items, a rocket (a recipe randomly provided by Celeste, who only shows up during meteor showers, and requires a lot of star fragments) and gold armor (a recipe randomly obtained from a smug villager that needs rare gold nuggets). Outside of that, it needs a lot of iron nuggets, even more gold nuggets, and 30 rusted parts. One would think that the gold nuggets would be the hardest items to get; they somehow aren't. The 30 rusted parts are an absolute chore to get and completely dependent on Gulliver's appearances (which have precisely the same issue as C.J. and Flick above), requiring you to either retrieve one from the recycling bin a day after helping Gulliver or up to five at a time by digging up Gulliver's communicator parts but not returning them to him.
• In general, crafting any DIY recipe that requires other DIY items is an ordeal, as you need to acquire the DIY recipes for the components or get the components from someone else. The ironwood kitchenette stands out; it's a nice-looking piece of furniture and provides tabletop space (which is hard to come by in New Horizons). This DIY recipe comes in one of the DIY recipe packs you can obtain early in the game. However, you can only make it if you're lucky enough to find the ironwood dresser and cutting board recipes, which each can only be obtained from a specific villager personality type (snooty and normal respectively), and every time they craft they will randomly draw from a pool of approximately 30 possible recipes per personality type. To make things worse, villagers can give out (and force the player to take) duplicate recipes, which are near-useless in the player's hands and whose main function is to be traded away.
• Obtaining the gold Fishing Tourney trophy requires a very high number of points on a Tourney day (300), which means you will have to play nonstop Fishing Tourneys for a couple of hours at least to accrue enough points. Add the time spent digging clams and crafting bait, and you have a tremendous time sink... and the event ends at 6 PM, limiting the time you can compete. The amount of time taken to reach that goal dramatically decreases if you do the fishing tourney in multiplayer though, but that requires Nintendo Switch Online to interact with others. While the point requirement is lifetime score, allowing you to obtain the trophy over several Tourneys, there's only one Fishing Tourney every season.
• Similarly the Bug-Off trophies require the same amount of points, however the time investment is slightly different since there isn't any kind of bug bait to craft. Less time spent crafting bait but no way to attract bugs to you. Furthermore, multiplayer isn't particularly helpful for Bug-Offs, as the spawn rate of bugs (and rare bugs) seems to be significantly lower in multiplayer, hurting your point gains and your profits from selling the bugs.
• Obtaining the Able Sisters shop can be this for many players as a result of the fact that the exact conditions for unlocking it still haven't been properly determined, with the only concrete idea being the need to spend money at Mabel's traveling stand with no indication of how many items or how many bells need to be bought/spent, with players reporting successful results within as early as a day or as late as several weeks. It should be noted that Mabel appears on random days prior to unlocking the shop, so if you encounter her on a particular day of the week, she's not guaranteed to show up again on that same day next week.
• Snowboys return in this game being the only way to net DIY’s for the Frozen series along with the large snowflakes required to craft them. However, like in the previous entries of the franchise in which they appear, only perfect Snowboy’s will reward the player after the first Snowboy that was made - even "So close!" is not enough. Once again, the player only has one shot per day to get it right and it can be difficult to tell if the snowballs are the correct proportions when putting them together. Dung beetles can also ruin the proportions of the snowballs and they can also be seen rolling them potentially onto the beach or off of a cliff, which will destroy them. The penalty for failing to make a perfect Snowboy is also hefty - the loss of a chance to obtain an exclusive DIY recipe and four large snowflakes over four days, all of which can only be obtained from Snowboys. The process can be tedious especially if time-traveling or Save Scumming isn’t involved, especially considering how strict and inflexible the Snowboys' judgment of their build is.
  • This also isn't aided by the wording, which is outright misleading if you live in an area that doesn't get snow and thus have never built one yourself. When you make an imperfect Snowman, you're given advice that you must make the two halves "perfect" in proportion to each other. Cue players rolling up two snowballs of the exact same size and wondering why that still isn't good enough.
• Getting every item available during Wedding Season can be troublesome, mostly for the time investment rather than the difficulty. You first have to put in at least seven days of time into the event, as the Wedding Fence/Wedding Wand DIY recipes are only awarded the day after the party photoshoot, with the other items being unlocked along the way. Reese only gives six of those items to you for free, and the rest need to be bought from Cyrus in exchange for Heart Crystals earned from decorating the set well. There are a lot of items in the wedding set, and some pieces like wallpaper/flooring (eight in total) and outfits cost 12 or more Heart Crystals apiece, in an event where you can earn a maximum of 15 Heart Crystals per day. Without trading with other players, it takes over two weeks of setting up photoshoots to afford everything, which is a lot by Animal Crossing event standards.
• Between 1.3.0 and 1.4.0, getting your villager's photo. Not only do you have to raise your villager's friendship level to a minimum of the 5th highest out of 6 levels, you have to give them a sufficiently expensive gift, and even then you only have a maximum 10% chance of them reciprocating with their photo, which is proportional to friendship level. Before 1.3.0, you could roll a chance to get a photo by gifting an item that has a sellback value of 250 bells or higher. After 1.3.0, that requirement became 2,500 bells or higher. Unless you had DIY recipes that used 4 or slightly more Iron Nuggets (e.g. Iron Wall Lamp, Kettlebell) and/or have catalogued items that can be purchased for between 10,000 to 20,000 bells (of which there are only 8 in the catalogue), obtaining your villager's photo could be a huge drain on your Bells or your resources - especially since gifting something expensive does not guarantee that you will receive something expensive in return. In a tacit acknowledgement that this requirement was too high, 1.4.0 quietly nerfed the required sellback value of a qualifying gift to 750 bells.
• Catalogue completion for the purchasable items is a far harder task than it looks. Most purchasable items are split into variations - for example, the "den desk" item can come in one of four shades of wood, or white. Each variation is a unique item and cannot be converted into another variation. The problem is that you can't just sit around and wait for a different variation of a specific item to appear in your island's Nook's Cranny - whenever an item with variations is on sale, only one specific variation of that item will ever be sold on that island - and there are exceptionally few opportunities to get other variations of such items, particularly the more expensive ones, in single-player. As one might have guessed, this is an extremely aggressive multiplayer promotion mechanic: to complete your catalogue (or even just to get certain items in the colours you want), you almost certainly have to participate in numerous "catalogue parties"^note multiplayer sessions where players pick up items left by the host, then drop them back on the ground - said action is enough to unlock those items in those variations, after which that specific variation can be directly ordered in Nook Shopping. Of course, you're out of luck if you don't have reliable Internet access or a Nintendo Switch Online subscription.
  • This was finally alleviated well over a year into the game's life with the 2.0 update, which re-introduced Cyrus as part of Harv's collective. Cyrus is able to customise any item in exchange for bells, including items the player cannot customise - primarily those available from Nook's Cranny. It's imperfect, requiring each individual customisation be done one by one and forcing the player to sit through Cyrus' dialogue and animations repeatedly, but it allows a dedicated player to fill out their catalogue. This is further helped by Tortimer's stall, which gives you access to your home storage, and is located directly adjacent to Cyrus and Reese's stall.
• Since 1.5.0, catalogue completion for the collectible NPC posters. Said patch removed a glitch allowing "touch trading"^note picking up and dropping an item to add it to the Nook Shopping catalogue NPC posters, thus removing all posters that had been added to the player's catalogue by "touch trading" instead of the intended manner (summoning the relevant NPC to Harv's Island, either by amiibo or by having them live on your island). Thus, if you want to get all the villager posters in your catalogue, you either need access to every single villager amiibo, have had every villager in the game on your island at some point in time, or a combination of the two. And that's before getting started on the special character posters, which can't be added to the catalogue without access to the relevant amiibos. Oh, and did we mention that there's a set of Sanrio collaboration posters that can only be obtained by scanning in some limited edition Sanrio x Animal Crossing amiibos, and it took Nintendo 5 years to get them reprinted?

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