Cockroaches: it’s hard not to hate them. Whether in real life or in Animal Crossing, roaches can be a pain. They get underfoot, they’re gross, and when they appear it’s almost always an indication that there’s something nasty going on in the household.
But even an insect’s life has value, right? It’s not as though cockroaches were born to be nuisances to the average person’s household—except in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, where they are. Cockroaches are a fixture of the franchise. Leaving your town, village, city, or island for at least a week results in roaches moving into your home and crawling all over your lovely, lovely floors.
The longer you stay away, the more there’ll be. The consequences to having them around can be dire; any villager who comes to visit will be so horrified about seeing a roach that they will choose to leave, and if you don’t kill every single roach in your house, they will continue to spawn until you do manage to get them all.
Roaches in the player’s home can’t be caught (they used to be catchable in Wild World), only killed. So players have learned to get a little creative with how they get rid of these in-game nuisances. You could always just run over them, but where’s the fun in that?
Reddit user u/Larssmaller discovered that you can use furniture items to squish cockroaches. In furniture arrangement mode, you can see any roaches scurrying freely around the room. As Larssmaller demonstrates, simply picking up a furniture item, waiting until a roach scurries into an empty space, and then dropping the furniture item down will kill the cockroach.
Using furniture to kill roaches isn’t new, per se. Before New Horizons introduced camera mode, players had to move furniture by going up to it and then dragging it in the direction they wanted it to go, or by pocketing the furniture item and then placing it again. As you can imagine, players have been using these methods to kill roaches for years.
However, the technique Larssmaller and New Horizons have enabled is admittedly much more interesting than just dragging a piano over a roach. Now players can drop pianos down from above; and while cruel, there’s no denying that it’s a little entertaining to play whack-a-mole with a giant statue.
But this is still Animal Crossing; while the franchise seems determined not to spare cockroaches any compassion, New Horizons includes a number of details that play into its good vibes and pleasant atmosphere. For example, Wilbur waves goodbye to any fish released near him, and player’s avatars will have a unique animation when they wake up after a dream.
