Hitting things in Animal Crossing is a time-honored tradition. Whether it’s to shake down a special rock for Bells, piss off that one annoying villager you can’t wait to move out of your town, or just taking an axe to an unwanted tree, players have been swinging their equipment at just about anything in the game for as long as the Animal Crossing franchise has existed.
And there’s no doubt that the developers have noticed. In New Horizons, smacking furniture items and obstacles will result in a distinctive ‘thud’ that slightly varies depending on what tool the player has equipped and what they’re swinging at. For example, a shovel colliding with a rock will clang, whereas hitting a villager with the bug net will result in a soft swish and a thump.
But that’s not all. The developers have gone above and beyond to enable players who enjoy unnecessarily whacking things in New Horizons. Twitter user DerlingLy discovered that hitting instrument furniture items with a tool will produce a unique sound that varies depending on the instrument, and posted a video to their Twitter demonstrating the various sounds.
If you’re thinking of making sweet music by smacking your instruments with a shovel, well—maybe it’s best to give up that dream. The sound produced by hitting an instrument is nothing at all like the melodies that result from interacting with musical furniture items normally.
Smacking the xylophone with a shovel makes a sound similar to trying to play the instrument with the wrong end of the mallets. Whacking the guitar sounds nothing short of painful; have you ever dropped an object right on the strings stretched over the sound hole? It sounds exactly like that, and just as agonizing.
DerlingLy manages to hit the oboe and pipe organ before the video ends, thankfully skipping over the grand piano entirely. The oboe makes what is easily the funniest noise of the bunch; think “cheap 99 cent store kazoo, but wet,” and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what to expect. The pipe organ actually doesn’t sound too bad. Hitting the organ sounds like slamming your hand down on the keys of a synthesizer—not great, but not as agonizing as smacking the guitar.
