Last month, Animal Crossing: New Horizons launched its DLC, Happy Home Paradise, bringing back the Happy Home concept from past spinoffs. It's been widely popular since its release as well, giving players more control over customization such as changing interior room sizes and changing the exterior of vacation houses, a feature that isn't in the main game, but plenty of techniques can be brought back to the island to be used on the player home, like polishing and partition walls.
Overall, the design mode (hitting the down arrow on the left Joy-Con) makes decorating indoors much easier, which is a must when it comes to Happy Home Paradise. The DLC is all about customizing the interiors, and, excitingly, the exteriors of vacation homes, giving players full control over the aesthetics and designs of villager homes that they didn't have before. Unfortunately, the exterior design mode is only present in Happy Home Paradise, which is a shame because of how easy it makes outdoor decorating in comparison to normal.
Outdoor Decorating in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
The Animal Crossing: New Horizons 2.0 update did bring its own slew of new features to the game that improve designing and decorating. Overall, there are hundreds of new furniture options which was a highly requested addition, but players can also make small but meaningful changes to their houses such as adding an accent wall inside, changing the interior pathways and stairways, and adjusting the exterior layout. However, it would have been great if the Happy Home Paradise DLC brought its outdoor design mode to the main game as well for the ease of terraforming islands.
Terraforming has been an excellent addition to the Animal Crossing franchise and seemed to be just what the series needed to do following New Leaf's implementation of ordinances, outdoor facilities, and leadership. However, it's a bit rudimentary and limiting, being a bit finicky in comparison to other sandbox and design games like The Sims 4. Building and destroying land and bodies of water is tedious, requiring players to be standing in a specific location and doing it in a precise order. Crossing the design mode with terraforming would streamline the entire process.
Even simply placing items outside in Animal Crossing: New Horizons can be a pain. For example, players often want to set items on top of furniture. While placing a lamp on a table may not be that tricky because lamps tend to look the same on all sides, the same can't be said about objects like a laptop, an ironing board, or a food dish. Typically, it's meant to face a certain way but there's no way to truly control how it will get put down, and sometimes rotating the furniture beneath it doesn't work. In design mode, the item on top can be rotating independently on the furniture underneath, but again, this can only be done indoors in the base game.
The outdoor design mode in the Happy Home Paradise DLC simply makes decorating easier. Building fences and laying down paths happens much more quickly, and players aren't limited by where their Animal Crossing avatar is able to travel—not to mention when the avatar gets in the way of designing. Perhaps it gets in the way of the slow-and-steady style of the Animal Crossing franchise, but it also provides access to design techniques that aren't possible otherwise and would generally make decorating islands much smoother.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is out now on the Nintendo Switch.