Animal Crossing: New Horizons introduced players to the wonderful world of DIY, allowing them to craft their own furniture more easily, and this was the wrong call by developers Nintendo. While this feature enables players to create hundreds of items for their homes and islands, the process can also be really tedious. Players spend a considerable amount of time crafting in New Horizons, and that is in part because the process just isn't streamlined.
Nintendo introduced the DIY crafting feature in Animal Crossing: New Horizons and allows players to create items using various materials found on their island. Players unlock this gameplay mechanic early in the game, and Animal Crossing regular villager-entrepreneur Tom Nook allows them to use his workbench in the Resident Services tent. Players progress through the game until they receive a letter from Nintendo with a simple workbench recipe attachment that allows them to craft their own.
New Horizons is Animal Crossing's biggest game to date and perhaps the most popular; however, that doesn't mean it has gotten everything right. Changes from previous titles left some fans of the franchise unhappy. Introducing new features into a game is always risky, and in this case, it may not entirely have paid off.
Crafting In Animal Crossing Has Too Many Issues To Be Fun
One of the main problems players have with crafting in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is how slow it is. The entire process from start to finish slows down gameplay to a crawl, and although the game is meant to be relaxed, some Animal Crossing players find the DIY rules to be downright boring. The process soon becomes repetitive and stale as players collect materials, go to the workbench, open up the menu, find the item they want, select the item, confirm the item, and then finally only craft one of the item.
Having to gather recipes for furniture and other items does make sense and creates the illusion that certain things are special because they are harder to get. But in practice, it just means players get frustrated trying to get their islands just right as they have to wait until they get the recipe they want; and even once that's done, they have to collect all the necessary materials. Finally, if they want more than one copy of an item or piece of furniture in Animal Crossing, there remains the continued chore of having to make them.
There is no bulk crafting in Animal Crossing: New Horizons despite players practically begging Nintendo for an update to provide one. When players want to craft more than one of something, gameplay soon devolves into button mashing through menus until the desired number of items are created. While repeatedly tapping A will speed up the animation, it's still a monotonous chore.
Another part of the crafting feature that players complain about is tool durability. Previous Animal Crossing games featured mechanics that included tool wear and tear, but that system was limited. New Horizons applied that mechanic to every single tool the player uses with no way to monitor it. This means that players constantly have to recraft their tools in order to get things done.
The final issue with the crafting feature is how players access the materials they have gathered. By expanding their homes, players have additional storage however, when crafting in their home, players cannot access any materials held in that storage area. All crafting materials must be in the player's pockets for DIY, which creates annoying delays for an already mind-numbing task.
Crafting in Animal Crossing: New Horizons was an expansion of the feature introduced in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, however, the execution of this has been unsatisfactory in the eyes of some players. Simply put, crafting isn't what's fun about New Horizons. While playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a pleasurable and relaxed experience overall, it's let down by a poorly thought-out crafting system that needs significant tweaks if it's going to appear in another game.