What Animal Crossing Needs in 2021

I think we can all agree that one of the best things to come out of 2020 was Animal Crossing: New Horizons. With regular updates, relaxing gameplay, new mechanics, and tons of things to do, it helped ease the pain of quarantine and provided all sorts of joy to people. However, I think we can all agree that Animal Crossing: New Horizons has some quality of life additions and new content it needs in 2021 to keep its reigning title amongst the best-sellers list. Here’s a list of things that Animal Crossing could use in 2021.

Crafting Quality of Life Additions:

Crafting is a new thing in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, so there’s no surprise that there are some quality of life things that the devs overlooked. The first of these additions that should be made is the option to craft multiples of an item (such as fishing bait) at a time. If the recipe is the same, it gets tedious to do it over and over ad nauseam.

Additionally, it would be nice to not have to pull ingredients out of your in-home storage to craft, if you are crafting inside your house. Other games have managed to pull this off and I think New Horizons could probably do the same thing. This brings me to another thing that should be added and adjusted next year.

Storage, Storage, and More Storage:

Before you say anything, yes I am aware that we just got an upgrade to our storage in the most recent update that allowed us to take things from 1600 total spaces to 2400. However, I have a few reasons as to why we need more storage. For one, storing crafting materials in your house is important to maintain tools, build furniture recipes, make gifts for your animals, and so on. Holiday events require things like pumpkins, acorns, cherry blossoms, eggs (we all remember those), and plenty of other things you may need to save up.

Not only that but if you are interested at all in the fashion side of Animal Crossing, then it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that you might run out of storage rather quickly. This is especially the case if you buy outfits in more than one color, and buy a large amount of them. That doesn’t even take into account the people trying to fill out their Nook Shopping catalog by buying plenty of furniture sets. Furniture sets are something that you can use to change up the look of your house, so changing things around every so often only makes sense.

Plus, as time goes on we’ll get more recipes (hopefully) and new furniture and clothing will probably be added. One addition that might be nice, is a Storage Shed that either just builds on to our storage (like a warehouse/garage) or a place to store crafting materials by themselves, so we can collect as many as we want and use them to our heart’s content.

While we’re on the topic of storage, why can’t we have shelves on our walls that we can put items on in our house? Let me line my walls with candles and cute things, please. Just flat shelving, nothing fancy ya know? Let us make use of the wall space.

Quality of Life adjustments for Shops:

Let’s talk about The Able Sisters for a minute. I love the sheer volume of fashion in New Horizons. However, I think it would be nice to be able to buy multiple outfits from The Able Sisters in one purchase rather than having to get out of the dressing room, get back in, and then buy another outfit, rinse and repeat.

It would also be nice to have some sort of visual representation that lets you know what items you’ve purchased already. Yes, we have the catalog, but a small bell icon on the screen to say “Hey, you bought this in this color already” would really save me some time.

Technically this isn’t a shop, but I would love for them to give us a Proper Post office so we can mail more than two items to friends in a day. I’m including this with shop upgrades because they could increase our airport size and just add a post office counter in somewhere.

More Shops / Additions to Existing Shops:

Okay, so hear me out here. Kicks sells bags, socks, and shoes right? Obviously, the Able Sisters has a limited amount of space to sell things. So, why not give Kicks his own storefront? Let him sell a wider range of products and offer people plenty of space to buy bags for all their outfits! I’m a fashion garden implement okay? Just let me have this.

While we’re on the subject of more shops, we have already heard rumors that Brewster will be setting up a coffee shop at some point. Why not a full-on Luxury furniture store? Gracie the Giraffe sold high-quality furniture in previous games, and this would give Nintendo an option to add more furniture sets from past games for people who want to spruce things up in a bigger way.

Leif could even open up a Florist or landscaping shop, with furniture for your island itself, flowers, shrubs, heck maybe even some new tree types! Give me some giant redwood trees or something! Also, let me just say. I haven’t forgotten about the upgraded shops from previous games. Let Timmy and Tommy expand the cranny to a Nook ‘N’ Go or Nookway. We need a shop that stays open later than 10 PM for those late-night fishing extravaganzas.

Island Expansion / Extra places to Travel:

Now, with the “more shops” request, you’re probably thinking “Yo, where the butts am I supposed to put em?” and to that I say, Nintendo should let us expand our island! Let us have five more villagers to move in. That will let us see more of the possible animals (I want Julian the Unicorn okay?) and give room for new shops.

If they don’t want to go that route, they could take inspiration from Animal Crossing: City Folk and create like a “Travelling Shop Yacht” or “Traveling Bazaar Barge” where we could take the airplane, go shop or do whatever, and then come home. This may also be an excuse for them to bring Katrina back so I can have my fortune told by a creepy but elegant cat.

Inventory Adjustment:

With tools breaking, I have some inventory-related things that would be nice to see. For one, it would be nice to have a toolbox that we could include multiple sets of tools in so we don’t have to keep running back home every so often. Alternately, if they don’t want to go that route, let us have another bag upgrade or two so that we can still have a pocket full of fish/bugs/etc and not run out of space.

On the subject of tools breaking, it would be nice for them to release (possibly with a store upgrade) a new tier of tools that take longer to break. Even if they take more crafting materials like Iron, it would still be nice to have. Also, Gold tools at this point (minus the watering can) are practically a waste. They take the same amount of time to break, or at least it seems that way. Yet you don’t really get many benefits out of them beyond triple shot slingshot and gold roses.

Another tool we could use is maybe a new type of bait? Some sort of upgraded bait that would let us increase the likelihood of getting higher quality fish would be helpful. Previous games had a luck mechanic to influence how bug catch and fishing worked, but I’d rather have better bait.

New Mechanics and Miscellaneous things:

Last but not least, it would be nice to see some things added to the game that weren’t able to be added due to needing holiday events ironed out first. Pocket Camp has Mining, which would be a cool thing to have in order to craft special DIY recipes. Let us do like “Gemstone tier tools” where you collect rubies, sapphires, emeralds, etc.

Rumors have swirled about cooking for a while, and I would absolutely love being able to cook dishes and farm vegetables. Even if they were all vegetarian dishes, it would still be fun to cook and farm like we did with the Pumpkins and Turkey Day, just on a wider scale.

Also, Isabelle needs to accurately tell us what NPC’s are going to be in town on a given day. I don’t know if anyone else is having this issue, but Isabelle seems to never mention Celeste or any of the other NPC’s. Maybe if she’d keep her finger on who is in town rather than talking about her Zoom call with her parents, we might get along better.

In addition to that, please let us mark NPC’s on our map, so I don’t have to hunt all over my island for Flick when I want to offload some bugs. It is such a pain to have to track down NPC’s like a bad case of Where’s Waldo.

We could also use some new hybrid flowers, the ability to lower the music volume in town during Meteor Showers, or just raise the volume of the sound from shooting stars in general. Animal Crossing: New Horizons has the potential to be not only the best-selling entry in the franchise (which it already is) but also the best entry in the franchise yet. Bring back some of the fan-favorite stuff (Gyroids?), while giving us some new stuff to freshen things up a bit.

I could see Animal Crossing: New Horizons getting new content for years to come. Nintendo has created the perfect platform to add new content and bring new things to the franchise, all while celebrating the series’ roots. 2021 could be a bright year for Animal Crossing, and I just can’t wait to see what is next.