Players of Animal Crossing: New Horizons' recently-released Happy Home Paradise DLC have discovered that the game's new polish effect can be customized, allowing users to turn their custom designs into unique animated creations. Animal Crossing Happy Home players have already used the tool for some impressive animations, creating flickering fires and spooky ghosts.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons received its first and last paid DLC earlier this month with the launch of Happy Home Paradise. The DLC gives players a job as a Happy Home representative, selling and customizing properties for the series' many villagers. Users can select their favorite villagers and create their perfect holiday home based on their specifications, choosing from a host of new decorative items and polishing their creations to perfection. Polishing makes furniture and decorations shine, but advancing far enough into the DLC will unlock the ability to use Animal Crossing custom designs, which replace the polish sparkles with whatever a player chooses.
Creative Animal Crossing players are already putting the polishing effect to good use, using their own custom designs to add some horror to their builds. Redditor Osallia has made a custom ghost-face pattern and combined it with the polishing tool to create a haunted doll, while doubledaaare set their home alight with lots of animated fires. The newly-discovered Happy Home feature has the potential to breathe a lot of life into otherwise standard builds, with players only limited by their imaginations.
Those looking to experiment with the Animal Crossing design tool will need to have the Happy Home Paradise DLC, which is a separate purchase from New Horizons, but comes included with the new Nintendo Switch Online N64 tier. After completing four homes for villagers, players will be granted the polishing ability, and after completing 12, custom design effects will be unlocked. Players can access them in polish mode through the plus button, scrolling to the bottom for custom effects. Custom designs can be found through the Custom Design Portal.
The polishing effect tool paves the way for one of the Animal Crossing community's favorite design pastimes: memes. Players have been recreating memes within the Nintendo game since it first released, but both Happy Home Paradise and the recently-released 2.0 update have made creating memes easier than ever thanks to improvements to the camera app, the addition of new items, and more. With the ability to build realistic fires using the polish tool, it's only a matter of time before Animal Crossing players will create some of the most popular memes based on their favorite shows and movies.
Source: Reddit/Osallia, Reddit/doubledaaare