If you happen to live in the UK, then you’ll know that the weather this week has been pretty glorious – mostly. So, as I was out on one of my evening walks with the dog, I gazed out toward the horizon as the sun was setting. Crepuscular rays pierced through the clouds and trees, butterflies erratically flip-flopped around my head, and I found my mind begin to drift toward Animal Crossing; was it about time I started a new game from scratch?
It's been a while since I last played Animal Crossing. New Horizons had done its job in keeping my mind occupied during the pandemic and accompanying lockdown, and truth be told, I wasn’t all that keen on dredging up memories by booting up my old save (not to mention the perturbed island residents I’d have to deal with). So I had to make a decision: do I just delete my New Horizons save and start again, or do I go back even further and revisit New Leaf?
I’ll spoil the ending for you now and confirm that I did indeed start afresh on New Horizons, but it wasn’t without a good deal of back and forth on my part. To be honest, the one thing putting me off was the thought of spending so much time gathering materials and crafting new items. I’ve never been fond of crafting in games, and New Horizons has it in spades.
Going back to it, however, I was surprised at just how unintrusive it really was; particularly in the early stages of the game. When you first venture out after Tom Nook’s island orientation, chances are you’re going to be picking up a bunch of branches, weeds, and rocks – if nothing else to make the place a bit more pleasing to the eye. Weeds aside, your initial haul is likely already enough to craft a flimsy axe, fishing rod, and net. From there, a few quick swings of the axe reveals that the trees yield three different types of wood: hardwood, softwood, and, uh… wood.
So now, of course, this opens up even more options, allowing you to craft the shovel, watering can, and (eventually) the vaulting pole. Soon enough, you’ll have crafted several items without even realising it, and that’s part of what makes New Horizons so special: like everything else in the game, the very notion of crafting is introduced in such a welcoming, gentle manner, it feels completely frictionless. Other games tend to chuck you into an open world, say “right, go find twenty gold-crusted fox gloves and skin 10 possum carcasses” and expect you to know what the heck you’re doing. Not Animal Crossing, though.
Even with my new-found appreciation for New Horizons’ DIY mechanics, however, I still have a bit of a complicated relationship with the whole thing. If push comes to shove, I’d still choose New Leaf as my all-time favourite Animal Crossing entry, mostly because it has no crafting. I just can’t make up my mind, can I? And yet, looking to the future, if whatever Nintendo has cooking within its iron-clad fortress contains or even expands upon the whole crafting thing, I wouldn’t be completely distraught.
That’s not to say it’s perfect, though. One of the most common criticisms of crafting is that it simply doesn’t let you create items in bulk. Let’s say you want to craft a whole bunch of fish bait, or perhaps a few tiki torches to dot around your island: you’ve got to do it one at a time, every time. So that means interacting with a crafting bench, locating the desired item in your list, mashing ‘A’ to speed up the animation, then skipping through the accompanying text boxes as quickly as you can. It’s a mess, and it’s something Nintendo absolutely needs to address for the future.
I could also do without the whole tool durability thing too; or at least see it improved drastically. I didn’t quite mind when weapons broke in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, because chances are I’d have something else to lean on when battling a gang of Bokoblins. With Animal Crossing, however, unless you think to manually craft several shovels or axes in one go (one at a time, remember), you’ve no other option than to high-tail it back to a crafting bench when one of them eventually breaks. There’s no alternative to digging up fossils or gathering wood from trees – you need those shovels and axes, so you better get making some more.
I’m not sure exactly what the solution is with the next game, but if Nintendo is able to implement a simple method of crafting items in bulk, that’ll go a long way to fixing most of its problems. Give us more durable tools early on (seriously, what's the point of a golden net when I've already caught every bug possible?), the ability to craft items from materials held in storage boxes, the option to skip the animations and text boxes that accompany the crafting process, and I think it could potentially wind up being a pretty beloved mechanic in the future.
But I’d love to know what you think, dear readers. Did you love crafting in New Horizons? Do you, like me, have a more complex love/hate relationship that could be mended with a few tweaks? Or would you rather Nintendo ditch the whole thing for something else entirely? Cast your vote in the below poll and leave a comment with your thoughts.
Would you want 'DIY' crafting mechanics in the next Animal Crossing? (629 votes)
- Heck yeah, I love it!
- Yes, but it needs a few tweaks and improvements
- I'm not fussed either way
- I wouldn't say no, but must less emphasis would be good
- No thank you, not again
What would most improve the crafting mechanics for you? (575 votes)
- The ability to craft in bulk
- More durable tools early on
- Enable the use of stored materials
- Let us skip the crafting animation and text boxes entirely
- Portable crafting bench
- Something else (comment!)