Animal Crossing: Happy Home Paradise allows players more freedom than ever, letting them decorate without having to own too much furniture. However, in order to include a sense of progression and challenge, Nintendo has given each villager a prompt for players to design the houses around. These prompts are usually pretty tame but are surprisingly diverse, ranging from resort themes to kitchen areas, even sometimes giving a color-related prompt like orange or red to mix things up.
Some villagers do have strange requests, though. The amount of furniture in Animal Crossing is massive but it does mean that villagers can ask for strange combinations. Match that with the fact that players can use custom designs to make these weird concepts even stranger and the houses that end up being designed in Happy Home Paradise become elaborate and complex.
Interesting inspiration can come from starting the Happy Home Paradise DLC and designing a house based on a tough prompt, though. The limitations of using specific furniture objects help designers better envision a floor plan than some of the more basic requests. But sometimes concessions need to be made in order to create Animal Crossing houses based on stranger ideas. It’s important and exciting to successfully design to the theme, so here are some tips and tricks for satisfying Happy Home Paradise’s toughest customers.
Animal Crossing's Peanut Wants A Happy Home Paradise Americana-Themed Vacation
Given Nintendo’s origins, it makes sense that there would be some Japanese-inspired prompts like Gladys’ for a Japanese garden and Shino’s for a Japanese-style stage to sing on. There are some other cultural prompts but the strangest is Peanut’s wish for an Americana-themed house. For those that want an American arcade design idea in Animal Crossing, pinball machines are available, but the pack leans more heavily toward diners and motorcycles, with K.K. Gumbo also available to improve the old-timey atmosphere.
Many of the other Happy Home Paradise prompts that feel tied to a countries’ culture are more generalized, like Kalus’ request for a “Classical Era” inspired house or Monique. Peanut’s prompt specifically calls out Americana, which means that players are either building a diner or a tourist-trap museum. It’s hard to tie a room together given the strange nature of the recommended items, but one possible way to do so is to set up a dining room with box sofas and counter tables.
Sheldon Wants a Traffic School On Animal Crossing’s Island
Sheldon doesn’t want a place where people drive, he wants a traffic school. There are other classrooms and an entire side-quest in Happy Home Paradise about designing a school, but this is a strange request for a game that's also played by kids who aren’t old enough to drive yet. His items are a minicar, a crossing signal, and a mannequin, meaning that players must integrate lessons into the indoor classroom.
The request is still driving-focused, given that none of the required items are school-themed. This request gets easier if players envision one floor as a classroom and another as a field test, but for those who haven’t unlocked that feature yet, it can be hard to do both at the same time. It might be better to design just a cityscape that has a car inside it while placing the mannequin in the center of a street-themed floor rather than design a traditional schoolhouse.
Egbert Wants a House Full of Numbers In Animal Crossing's Happy Home Paradise
Both of the above villagers want furniture items in Animal Crossing 2.0, but Egbert has a wildly abstract theme that stretches the possibilities of interior design - he wants a house designed entirely around numbers. In Happy Home Designer for the 3DS, the request was stricter being limited to even numbers, but even with the additions, it’s a tough theme to design around. The only required furniture item is the color wheel with numbers on it, but this actually hurts the design rather than helping it. With such a narrow and off-the-wall request, it would help to have some direction beyond clocks and games.
This is definitely a prompt to take later in Happy Home Paradise with furniture effects and features, but for those who get Egbert early, there are still a few fun takes one could pull off with his house. Dressing it up like The Count’s lair from Sesame Street or putting down floor tiles to create a sudoku puzzle might give the space some flair. The number wheel could inspire a player-designed board game or possibly a quiz show in Animal Crossing, but these still require a lot of planning and objects that Egbert doesn’t give designers right away.
Cesar Wants An Unfinished Animal Crossing House In Happy Home Paradise
Most Animal Crossing houses require lots of time and effort to progress, but Cesar has a request that seems to go against all of that. Cesar wants an unfinished house like one in a city Animal Crossing should return to and specifically wants cones, safety barriers, and cement mixers to accomplish that. The task of creating an unfinished home might seem like an easy task, but there are only a few items that fit the construction theme the game wants players to build.
Happy Home Paradise labels this task as a “half-built” house, a phrase that implies more progress than simply building a construction site. Using furniture other than the pieces included in the order isn’t required by Animal Crossing, but it is hard to do without the room feeling haphazard. The best way to tackle this design is to split the room down the middle, fill one side with beds, tables, and couches, and then fill the other with the construction equipment Cesar requires.
One of the greatest elements of designing houses for residents in Happy Home Paradise is that players can put as much work into their houses as they want. If someone wants to simply fill the floor up with order items or wants to go farther and integrate wall and ceiling decorations, both will be rewarded by the game. These villagers provide uniqueness to those wishing to give characters simple spaces to live in and challenges for designers who want to test their interior decoration skills.
Later in the game, players can even pitch ideas themselves to the villagers, meaning that if someone wants these quirky villagers in their Animal Crossing: Happy Home Paradise resort, they can do so without having to manage the strange requests. There’s a lot of freedom given to people to play the game as casually or as technically as they choose. With the Happy Home Network app allowing everyone to share their designs online and through social media, all these different playstyles can be shown off and have equal success.