Animal Crossing: New Horizons: 9 Quality-Of-Life Features We Want

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has captured the hearts of scores of players since it first launched back in March, and it's become something of a phenomenon. If you're like us, you're probably still playing almost every day (perhaps even for multiple hours), checking your turnip prices, fine-tuning your town layout, breeding flowers, and more Animal Crossing goodness.

But even if you love the game like we do, you probably have a few nitpicks by now. If you've crafted tons of fish bait or gotten really into terraforming, there might be a few features you'd like to see--just those little quality-of-life updates that tweak the minor issues that crop up when you've played a game for 200 or more hours. And because New Horizons is already getting ongoing support and new content updates, we can really dare to dream.

We put our heads together to come up with nine quality-of-life updates we'd love to see come to New Horizons. Let us know in the comments what other features you want to see come to the adorable life/gardening/friendship sim! And Nintendo, if you're reading: We say all this with love.

Let Island Visitors Come And Go In The Background

Have you ever tried to leave someone's island in the middle of a stalk market rush? It's infuriating.

Selling turnips in Animal Crossing is no joke, some of us even relying on price predictors to guide our selling decisions. But for larger groups, announcing good turnip prices can turn into a mad rush in a matter of minutes. Whenever someone comes or goes to the island, everyone on that island has to sit through a mandatory arrival or departure sequence. At the worst of times, I can't go five steps without my screen darkening and showing the travel board. Sometimes if I'm feeling bold, I'll make a quick detour to the Able Sisters shop after unloading my turnips. This is usually how it goes:

I hear a gentle chime and a stock ticker-type bar appears on the screen, telling me to close my windows because someone is trying to arrive. This is when I begin sweating.


"NO!" I yell in defiance. The analog stick sharply veers downward as I begin my race against time. I hit "Proceed to Checkout" with abnormal force, but it doesn't matter. The screen goes black and I'm left staring helplessly at my worm-like reflection.

Finally after a good minute or two, I can resume activity. I bolt out of Able Sisters and make a beeline for the airport, but I don't even get around the corner before the entire fiasco starts again. Sometimes there's a line already IN the airport, and we all waste an extra 15 minutes just waiting for the option to leave.

Nintendo, I'm begging you. Let people come and go in the background. Use the display bar to announce travel activity. It'd be majestic, like someone announcing you and your official title at court. In my case, it would be "Festive Trash Ashley."

It's true, we won't get to see the fashionable walk-ins and outs, but if you're having a good old-fashioned hangout without turnips, you'll see your friends' outfits regardless. In the meantime, for everyone else who has to suffer through the mad, stilted race to the airport: solidarity. | Ashley Oh, Social Media Producer

Let Us Place Rugs Outside

Once a week, Saharah visits my island, and I buy three rugs from her. I've been playing New Horizons for a while now, so I have a lot of rugs and not enough house to use all of them. My greatest wish is to be able to place rugs outside, specifically to use as picnic blankets and maybe for an outdoor reading nook. I don't have the custom design slots to spare for rug and blanket designs when there are perfectly good rugs sitting in my home storage!

Also, you could put rugs outside in Pocket Camp. New Horizons borrowed quite a few ideas from Pocket Camp, including crafting, so I'm thinking putting rugs outside is a fair expectation. | Kallie Plagge, Reviews Editor

Select And Store Multiple Items

After a long day of running around my island, I like to come back to my house, kick off my shoes, and throw all the new bits and pieces I don't need right now into my storage. The problem is, I need to go into my inventory and move items to storage one at a time. That's silly, and there has to be a better way.

New Horizons already lets you select multiple items in your inventory to sell to the Nooklings, or select multiple fossils to show Blathers. It lets you eat 10 coconuts at once for crying out loud. So why not let us dump a bunch of stuff into our home storage all at once? Please? | Edmond Tran, Senior Editor

Put Wall Decor On Panels/Cliffs

While custom textures have been a great way to add personality to your island, New Horizons still has a lot of great wall decor that has sadly been confined to the interior of your island home. Animal Crossing players have found a lot of ways to be creative with building unique outdoor spaces, but being able to hang clocks, pictures, clothing, signs, and custom paintings on wall panels, cliffsides, and even fences could add another dimension of customization. That doesn't just apply to outdoor spaces either--lots of players use wall panels to section off parts of rooms inside their home. If they're already being used as dividers and makeshift walls anyway, it only makes sense to let players hang and mount decor onto them as well. | Chloi Rad, SEO Editor

Let Me Sort My Inventory

Animal Crossing is a game that's all about collecting items, gathering resources, crafting tools, and placing decor all around your island--and this means my inventory is almost always packed with an assortment of these items as I go about my day in New Horizons. Unfortunately, there's currently no way to instantly sort all of the items in your inventory, and with 40 slots available at full capacity, that means things get disorganized fast.

I'll admit that my need to have items of the same type sitting next to each other in my inventory is a highly personal obsession, but the lack of this simple feature in a game that centers around picking up items is frustrating. And considering the ability to sort is available with your in-house storage, I'm puzzled as to why it was deliberately left out for your personal inventory. Being able to quickly sort and see what I have on hand as well as how many empty spaces I have left would be a breath of fresh air for organization freaks like myself. All I want is for wood to be next to wood, flowers next to flowers, and tools next to tools (on the top row, of course). Is that too much to ask? | Jenae Sitzes, Commerce Editor

Streamlined Crafting UI

I don't know about you, but I am prepared to craft at all times in New Horizons. I carry all types of wood, tree branches, clay, stone, and iron with me everywhere, just in case I need to craft a new tool or something. But I don't carry around fancy crafting materials like gold nuggets or star fragments because... well, I don't want to accidentally sell them, and I don't need them to make tools, really.

Because of that, I really wish that the crafting bench in my house would just let me use the resources I have in my home storage instead of making me pull all the materials out ahead of time (and possibly forget one I don't carry with me everywhere). The crafting bench already tracks how many of a crafted item you have in your pockets, so why not track the materials I have in storage too while I'm at home? I'm just trying to make a bathtub out of stardust.

Also, please let us craft more than one of something at a time. Fish bait is such a process. | Kallie Plagge, Reviews Editor

Give Me Grids!

I'm well aware that my progress in Animal Crossing is moving at what I'll charitably call a Tortimer's pace. I've just recently started heading for the end-game to attract a certain naked musician to my island, and Isabelle tells me I need to spruce up the place with more decorations and flowers. That has jump-started my plan to reorganize my island with more thoughtful building placement than I had exercised before, when I just slapped things haphazardly without knowing how many would ultimately be coming.

I'd like to make my buildings line up all nice and neat, to arrange the island decor around them, but it's nearly impossible to eye it up. It feels like a catch-22, in which I need to unlock paths to line up my houses, but I need to line up my houses to decorate the island nicely enough to unlock paths. I'm left to dig rows of holes as guidelines. Surely adding a land grid, as well as a zoom-out function for a better overhead view, wouldn't be too much to ask? My island's urban planning department would appreciate it. | Steve Watts, Associate Editor

Go Away, Isabelle

Okay, Isabelle. I get it. You watched a TV show last night and the host was chatty. You talked to your parents on Skype or whatever. Let's keep things moving here, I only have 10 minutes to find my fossils, hit my rocks, and plant my money tree before I have to get ready for the day. I like you, but I've heard your stories a million times and if there isn't anything significant happening on my island, I don't want to have to trudge through a dozen conversation boxes to get things rolling in the morning.

I'm sorry, I know that's a harsh thing to say--maybe you could just tell me which of the random vendors is on my island today instead? | Edmond Tran, Senior Editor

Streamlined Path Construction

As someone who grew up playing the likes of RollerCoaster Tycoon, unlocking the Island Designer app felt like the point at which New Horizons really began to offer up the customisation options I craved, allowing me to finally link up the different areas of my island with proper pathways and trails.

However, as much as these options scratch my construction itch, at times building paths feels painful. It's slow, fiddly, and the game's curiously fickle top-down camera makes trying to forge a path through my densely-packed orchards or behind buildings beyond frustrating. At its worst it feels like you're fighting against the game's systems instead of being empowered by them. The results may look great, but having the ability to toggle the camera, lay a strip of path in one go and lay curved corners at will would streamline the process and make me feel more like the construction worker I want to be--and less like a glorified gardner with a hard hat. | Chris Morris, Producer