Animal Crossing: New Horizons was an instant hit when it was released earlier this year. Fans have fallen wildly in love with the game's relaxed pacing and peaceful atmosphere, finding it a much needed reprieve from the current chaos of the world. But despite its critical and commercial success, the game features a number of awkward and clunky features that have been frustrating players. Rather than waiting for Nintendo to improve the game, some hackers have been adding their own quality-of-life improvements to Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
In order to break into Animal Crossing: New Horizons, hackers use modded Switch consoles in tandem with special software. This allows them to manipulate the game in ways that vanilla players cannot. Once the Animal Crossing is hacked, players can get up to all sorts of shenanigans, like creating Star Fragment trees.
Hackers have a pretty bad reputation in the gaming world, often rightly so, like when Grand Theft Auto 5 hackers ruined the single player campaign for some players. However, in this case, the hackers are actually make the game better. One hack improves the player's stacking capabilities. In the base game, a stack of items like wood or ore can only contain 30 units. Hackers have upped that number to 99, meaning players can do a lot more with their limited inventory space.
Hackers have also streamlined the Turnip system. Normally, Turnips have be stored either in the player inventory, or placed on the ground. Hackers have changed the game so that Turnips can be stored in the house's inventory, just like every other item. Now players won't have to build Turnip vaults to keep their investments safe.
Some hackers are even working on decreasing the amount of text in the game, so that players can get through conversations faster. It's hard to imagine wanting to spend less time talking to everyone's favorite villager Raymond, but to each their own.
While these hacks will only affect a small number of game mechanics, they do speak to a larger issue. Clearly there are a lot of problems that players have with Animal Crossing that Nintendo needs to address. And until Nintendo does, hackers like this will fill the void.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available now for Nintendo Switch.