Animal Crossing hackers are making the quality-of-life changes Nintendo won’t

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is an intentionally slow and thoughtful game ... but that doesn’t mean players enjoy all the mechanical hindrances that come with that design ethos. Since the game’s release, fans have been clamoring for Nintendo to make improvements for the sake of efficiency. While it seems unlikely that the company will acquiesce to the demands, hackers are happy to take the lead.

New Horizons’ hacking scene is an active one — the community recently made headlines after injecting impossible star fragment trees into the game, which promptly started getting sold for real money. These hackers use modded Nintendo Switch consoles in tandem with special software to help them do whatever they’d like within the life simulator, and not just for aesthetic gains.

For instance, a hack developed in April increases the player’s stacking capabilities. Where before, some materials like wood or ore could only go up to 30, now they can go up to 99. The list is long, and includes fruit, seeds, customization kits, fences, Nook Miles Tickets, fish bait, and more.

The hack also allows you to trade fish and insects, though only with people who are also running the mod. Perhaps the most eye-popping feature of this hack is that it allows you to store turnips in your house, rather than relegating you to take up entire rooms. Imagine!

Players also really want to streamline crafting, ideally by being able to make things in bulk. A recently updated hack makes crafting even easier than that by giving you “sets” that will spawn whatever materials you need for specific DIYs.

Things can get more granular than that. There are cheats for walking through walls, making unbreakable tools, sped-up animations, freezing time, and changing the direction of a balloon. That’s in addition to typical stuff, like spawning any item you can think of or any villager you could possibly want.

There’s even a work-in-progress mod that decreases the amount of text in the game so that dialogue moves along quicker. One hacker even figured out a way to move the plaza, which is something I’ve been dying to do after accidentally placing it way too close to my airport.

Many of these hacks, we could never realistically expect Nintendo to implement — they’re cheats. But a couple of these tweaks would be nice, wouldn’t they?

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