Here’s something you might not know about Animal Crossing: New Horizons: your later villagers have much better homes than your first villagers.
Ever notice how some villagers live in mansions while others live in run-down, basic-looking shacks? Well, it turns out that there’s a reason for that, and it all has to do with Nintendo not wanting to rain too much on your interior design parade.
When you first start New Horizons, you live in a tent. Not wanting to rough it for your entire time on the island, you soon expand into a true home and eventually build a thriving town. But in the beginning, it’s just you and a tent. The first two villagers that arrive also live in tents in strange solidarity with the player.
Then once you can build your own home, those two villagers also get homes that look roughly equivalent to your own. They’re very basic, have rough wooden furniture, and aren’t really anything to write home about.
That changes with the next set of villagers, as explained by Twitter user @Nellichka. In a Twitter thread, she shows how early abodes for villagers are truly awful, featuring dirt floors and bare walls, while later villagers have sweet cribs with furniture, pianos, and espresso machines.
According to @Nellichka, Nintendo designed New Horizons so that the villager will never have a house that’s better than the player’s. Early houses are generic homes that are based on the gender and personality type of the villager. Girls with normal/peppy personalities get bizarrely childlike houses, while boys live in dirt shacks.
After the first campsite visitor arrives, new villagers “will have fancy personalized houses to their aesthetic.”
But there’s a problem: the starter villagers’ houses do not change. They’ll always live in dirt shacks, with few options to improve their lots. First, you can gift them furniture and hope that they use it, but they don’t understand what to do with flooring or wallpaper. This prevents them from really fixing up their places.
The second thing you can do is just kick them out and get new villagers, or use amiibo to get them back. But that seems like a mean thing to do to someone living in a shack.
Source: Twitter, Polygon
