Bulk Storing & Removing Items
The world of Animal Crossing is very item-focused. You’ve got your tools, clothing, accessories, furniture, bugs, fish, and any other nicknacks you want.
Fortunately, Nintendo introduced house storage in New Horizons providing players with tons of space to store their stuff without having to fill their actual house rooms with the guff. The problem with this comes when you go to put items in and out of storage, though.
Each item has to be individually selected, and the option to ‘Move to Storage/ Pockets’ afterwards. If you’re trying to clear your entire inventory to go and buy turnips, for example, this entire process can take a good few minutes.
So why not massively streamline the process? Let us select multiple items from our pockets or inventories, and give us a group action to send everything to storage in one. It may not seem like a massive deal, but trust us, it’d make item management far less tedious.
Crafting with Materials from Storage
While we’re on the topic of storage, we might as well bring up this one, too.
If you’re like me, whenever you get max out a stack of tree branches, stones, or a type of wood, I stow it away in my house storage and build up a new stack in my pockets. This means I have a healthy supply of crafting materials in my storage at all times.
Alas, if I ever need to craft a new tool or some furniture, I then need to return to my house, painstakingly select and move each material into my pockets before moving onto the next.
Now, imagine if you could automatically use the crafting materials from your storage at crafting benches? Imagine how much more convenient that’d be. The answer is a lot.
Dropping Items in Bulk
All turnip traders feel our pain on this one. As our staff writer Rebecca has shown above, if you’re in the turnip business or you’re just doing a lot of picking up and moving items around your island, dropping each item separately is a painstaking and time-consuming process.
Now imagine if, just like the ability to move multiple items in and out of storage, we could drop multiple items at once.
Even if this was just limited to nine — as that’s the most items you can drop in one spot before you fill the area immediately around you — that’d be a welcome improvement.
Batch Redeeming Nook Miles Purchases
Once you’ve properly settled into the rhythm of island life in New Horizons, you’ll no doubt find yourself with an abundance of Nook Miles.
These can be spent on all kinds of things, from Bell and Nook Miles Tickets through to exclusive furniture, DIY Recipes, and convenient shortcut features like the tool ring. But once again, Nintendo makes the process of spending these on multiple items at once infuriating.
Well, you kinda can’t buy multiple items at once. You’ll instead need to select your item, let the process complete, and then interact with the terminal in the corner of the building all over again, select the ‘Redeem Nook Miles’ option and then buy the next item.
Even if you’re trying to buy multiple of the same item, you’ve still got to purchase them one at a time.
Now imagine having a ‘Shopping Cart’ you could add items to as you browse, before checking out and having the Nook Miles deducted from your total. Far simpler, right? Take a cue from Amazon Nook!
Online Queue System
Ever tried getting in or out of someone’s island when they have an exceptionally high turnip price and a Dodo Code on Twitter? It’s hell incarnate.
If it’s not for random unexplained network errors, it’ll be the ambiguous ‘interference’ issues when trying to make your way to an island that’ll have you asking Orville over and over to try again.
Even when you actually get to the island you wanted to visit, you’ve then got the fun of trying to leave as others flock in. Only one person can enter or leave the island at any given time, and for everyone else, you’ll have to keep trying again until the game finally lets you.
Instead of this hit-and-miss approach, surely an online queue system would work far better? As you enter the Dodo Code and prepare for flight, you’re arranged place into a queue for joining.
If the island is full, the player at the top of the queue joins the island as another leaves, saving players’ thumbs from repeatedly smashing A just to try and get to the island.
Able Sisters Fitting Room Bulk Buying
If you’re a real fashionista in New Horizons, then Able Sisters is one of your key stops in a day. It’s filled with clothes and accessories that you can mix and match to find your perfect style.
Once again, though, the UI when using the fitting rooms is unnecessarily cumbersome. After putting together your outfit of multiple items, you’re then for some reason forced to purchase each one separately, rather than just being able to buy everything in one simple transaction. You know, just as you would in real life.
I wouldn’t queue five different times to buy a shirt, some pants, a hat, jacket, and socks in real-life (imagine if I did though!), so why should we have to in Animal Crossing?
Continuing Shopping & Conversations Online
Ha! You thought we limited our online entries to just one. Don’t be silly!
Playing with friends or strangers online in New Horizons is fun when there are only a few of you, but if you have a constant ebb and flow of people entering and exiting your island — as many do thanks to turnip prices and the stalk market — it becomes nigh-impossible to do just about anything.
Having a conversation with a character? You’ll be forced to end it as a player enters or leaves the island.
Selling all those precious turnips or foreign fruit at Nook’s Cranny? I hope nobody’s arranging with Orville to enter or leave that island, because guess what? It’s going to force you to stop your shopping spree, too!
It’s not just a case of the incoming or outgoing player having to wait a little longer, either. If you don’t stop shopping or conversing with a villager, you run the risk of crashing the entire multiplayer session. Brilliant.
Nintendo’s online service isn’t the best, but we’d have expected something that can at least allow players to drop in and out without halting everyone else’s progress.
Choosing Item Color While Crafting
So you’ve gathered all the materials you need to finally decorate that new room in your house. You’re going to give it all the ‘Pink Wood’ paint color because you can, and lo and behold what could have been a far simpler process becomes yet another case of tediously flicking through countless menus.
In its current state, players have to craft an item or piece of furniture, then back out and select the option to Customize an item at the crafting bench. Unnecessary.
Now imagine if you could simply select the item you want to craft, and the paint color option popped up immediately after it? Now wouldn’t that be something!
Tool Durability Bars
Even if you get the golden tools in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you’re never safe from having them break on you. Tool durability was introduced in New Horizons for more than just the axe, and with it comes more headaches for players.
You’ll now have to craft tools constantly whenever they break. However, that’s not the gripe we’ve got here, it’s the fact there’s no way of telling when a tool is about to break that becomes particularly annoying.
In previous games, your axe would begin to visibly crack as it got closer to breaking, at least giving you some indication of when you’d need to buy another. In New Horizons this has gone. You’re left playing the guessing game.
Be it a more subtle visual representation of a tool’s condition, or a durability bar, something to indicate how much life your tools have left would most definitely be welcome.
More Custom Design Slots
For the artistically talented Animal Crossing players, the ability to get really intricate with custom designs in New Horizons was very much welcome. Nintendo even gave us 50 slots to fill up with whatever we wanted.
Turns out 50 slots definitely isn’t enough. especially when you factor in that some players will use multiple slots to make nice stone paths to guide visitors around their island.
Think you can delete a design from a slot once you’re done with it? Guess again, if you delete it from the slot, it’s removed from your island, too.
While a simple increase in the custom design slots would be the simplest solution, an alternative would be the ability to upload custom designs to the cloud and have them stored there forever so you can safely delete it in your own slot to make room for new ones.
Banking Phone App
Ever found yourself at Nook’s Cranny, buying a painting from Redd, or acquiring an obscene amount of turnips from Daisy Mae, only to find that you don’t have the Bells on you to pay for it all?
Now imagine how much more convenient it’d be to have the Banking app on your Nook Phone that allowed you to either pay for items via the Bells in your Savings Account, or to withdraw Bells into your pockets on the fly?
A simple, effective, and modern solution to this pesky problem.
Step-Skipping in Crafting
Your axe breaks. It’s annoying. You go all the way to your house, individually pulling out the tree branches, stone, and iron nuggets from your storage.
You trek over to your closest Crafting Bench and then have to follow the silly steps of crafting the Flimsy Axe before you can craft a regular Axe. You have all the crafting materials and recipes for both items, but you have to still do it step-by-step.
This little QOL suggestion would be to simply allow players to craft the final item they actually want, and have the game indicate it’ll deduct the crafting materials for both the final item (the axe in this example) and the flimsy axe required to craft it.
Bulk Item Crafting
Like many of our suggestions in this post, our final one is all about being able to do things in bulk. Specifically, bulk item crafting. Ever tried to craft a bunch of Fish Bait for a hefty session by the sea? It’s yet another case of crafting them one at a time.
Just ask players how many of the item they want to craft. As long as they’ve got the materials, they can craft 10 Fish Bait and be on their way in a minute, rather than the five it currently takes sifting through the various menus.
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