The first DLC released for Animal Crossing New Horizons has brought long-time fans a new burst of inspiration, with many players returning to the game after long hiatuses. In Happy Home Paradise, you are given the job of an interior designer, working with Lottie and her team to build customized vacation homes for villagers. Introducing a smooth new interface for decorating homes and exteriors, plus new furniture added alongside the 2.0 update, designing has taken on a whole new light in Animal Crossing.
There are so many new options, features, and customizations to explore in Happy Home Paradise that it can sometimes feel overwhelming. If you are looking to up your designer game, here are a few advanced tips and tricks to keep in mind.
10 Return To Homes To Remodel
Luckily, this is not a "one-and-done" type of designing DLC. Once you have completed a vacation home, you can return to it at any point by using the Happy Home Network app on your phone. You will only be able to use the app to re-visit homes while at Happy Home Paradise, however. You can talk to any villager at any previous home to bring up the topic of remodeling. As you continue to progress through Happy Home Paradise, you will acquire tons of new furniture and special features, which can be added to your first builds with this option.
Plus, using the remodeling feature is a valid strategy for grinding Poki. Just grab a handful of villagers from the beach or facilities at Happy Home Paradise, travel to the site of their vacation home, and plop down the required furniture before calling it quits. You will still be paid for this minimal effort, and when you return later to work on the home, you will be awarded additional Poki just for the remodel!
9 Customize Plants To Create Variety
You probably know that you can press "x" to customize most furniture items to choose different colors or aesthetics for that item. But you can also use the same feature to customize plants in your exteriors as well. If you customize plants such as trees, you can cycle through different stages of growth. This works for flowers, crops, and bushes as well! Having plants in multiple stages of growth in your yard is a great way to add depth and character to your exterior.
8 Double Up Pillars To Line Them Up With Furniture
Every Animal Crossing player knows the struggle of trying to get something to line up or center perfectly... only to be let down every time. Pillars are no exception, as their size can sometimes make it impossible to use them in a perfectly symmetrical design. If you want to get your pillars so that they line up "flush" with a piece of furniture, such as counters, doubling them up or even creating a cluster of four to make one "big" pillar is a good cheat around this issue.
7 Cycle Through Times For Different Weather Effects
One of the coolest features for designing the exterior of your vacation home is the ability to literally manipulate the time of day or weather. Hitting "up" on the d-pad will bring up this option, showing a bar with different times of day, and also two boxes for "sunny" and "rainy" weather. You can actually use these two features in conjunction to create some pretty cool effects.
For instance, to create a foggy effect, choose the "rainy" option and cycle through the times of day until you find one where it isn't raining but foggy. This usually occurs early in the morning. You can even use this to change the strength of the wind or create a thunderstorm.
6 Use Music Players For Extra Ambiance
As you progress through Happy Home Paradise, you will get to know Wardell the manatee a little better. This absolute sweetie will teach you how to add "soundscapes" to your vacation homes, which will give your builds ambient sounds such as jungle noises or crowd chatter. The best part, though, is that you can use soundscapes in junction with music to create an even more rich ambiance in your home! As you design more homes, you will collect more music players and K.K. Slider songs to choose from to create the perfect atmosphere.
5 Get Creative With Lighting
If the addition of hanging light fixtures wasn't good enough, after designing eleven vacation homes, you will unlock the ability to create special lighting effects. You can adjust both the color and the saturation of the light in the room with this feature, which can really amp up the aesthetic of a home. Use this to add some extra moodiness or even fake a "natural light" look.
4 Use Custom Designs For Paths
Animal Crossing fans have long been relying on Custom Designs to amp up the aesthetic of their islands. Luckily, Happy Home Paradise lets you use Custom Designs in a few different ways, including custom paths. This is especially useful since so many vacation homes do not line up with the bridges on their plot. Using custom designs to create "meandering" paths is a good way to cheat this problem visually.
3 Vary Up Your Polish Effects
A new mechanic entirely unique to Happy Home Paradise is the ability to polish furniture. But polishing is not limited to just giving your furniture a bit of sparkle, oh no. Eventually, you can unlock a whole bunch of different "polishing" effects with funny names such as "flutterflap" or "dizzyspin" which will leave an almost comic book style motion effect on furniture items. "Flutterflap" is an especially neat effect to use in homes that have flowers or other fauna to add some butterflies.
2 Add Clutter For Depth
While it might not be perfect for every vacation home, an easy way to bring a little more "life" to your build is by simply adding a bit more clutter. In real life, our spaces often look more "lived-in" than showroom pristine. Filling counters with everyday items such as food or kitchen appliances can help towards this end. Placing miscellaneous furniture like books, papers, or even cans and plastic bottles to simulate "trash" can help things feel more natural too.
1 Use Partitions To Create Indoor Decks
Happy Home Paradise introduced us to "partition" walls, and every player who had ever made a design purely with customized simple panels breathed a sigh of relief. Partition walls can be used for more than simply "partitioning" off a section of a room, however. With the help of accent walls and rugs, you can use partitions to create your own deck or patio area inside a vacation home. This brings some awesome depth to any interior design, especially with the help of animated or "3D" wallpapers.