With Animal Crossing: New Horizons adopting a crafting system similar to games like Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp or Minecraft, for creating furniture, tools, and items, it decides to take it one step further by giving the player the option to customize certain things to their liking.
While not everything can be garnished with a new coat of paint, as there are just way too many items within Animal Crossing: New Horizons, many of them can be recolored or even branded with your own custom designs. Many things are compatible with customization kits, but we feel that there are a few things that really should allow this, but simply don't. Here are 10 of those untouchable times, ranked by how much we want to customize them.
Updated on June 2nd, 2020 by Connor Smith: Compared to any other entry in the franchise, Animal Crossing: New Horizons definitely offers the most amount of personalization in just about every aspect of the game. Furniture can be placed outside, there's a changeable quick-selection for tools, and, most importantly, some furnishings and items can be customized at the crafting bench.
This list was updated to add exclusive items seen in the Bunny Day event that occurred after the publishing of this list, as well as to add some additional entries that made us question why they haven't been customizable since the game's launch.
15 Animal Crossing: New Horizons Switch
It's time to get meta up in this island, as New Horizons graces players using the new Animal Crossing themed Switch. It's exactly what you think it is: a replica of the system in your hands that you can place wherever they desire. Anyone playing on a normal Switch model will receive the standard red and blue Joy-Con variant, which later allows its Joy-Cons to be changed to gray.
However, the ACNH Switch does not allow customization of any sort, and it would have been nice to at least change the Joy-Con colors while keeping the new Switch dock that makes it unique. The normal Switch can only change to gray Joy-Cons, and it also would have been nice to have access to the multiple other color variants that are available.
14 TVs
Having a nice TV can be a central part of a nice room within Animal Crossing, and New Horizons offers a few different choices. But none of them are customizable and instead have the function to be turned on and off to display a show.
While this may seem like a replacement for customization, the computer monitors in New Horizons can be customized with a custom design of the player's choice, and this would be very nice to see with the TVs as well.
13 Bunny Day Items
A lot of players ended up being quite unhappy with how the Bunny Day event in New Horizons turned out, and the first major event for the game didn't paint the best picture for ones coming later. Coupled with its length, egg-finding rate, and craftable items, some players even went as far as to timeskip past it altogether.
The argument against Bunny Day is made even more clear when looking at the craftable items specifically, as they all end up feeling similar to each other; and, of course, there's no customization to be had here.
12 Cardboard Box
This may seem like an odd choice when considering all of the furniture available in New Horizons, but the cardboard box seems like such an obvious choice for customization. First off, it's one of the first items you can get in the game, and you'll frequently be able to pick up free ones from the recycle box.
These boxes do come in different variants, but none allow the usage of color-changing, or most importantly, custom patterns. Being able to write, doodle, or put designs on a box could have a ton of usage for home decor. It seems like a waste to otherwise keep these stuffed in your storage.
11 Rocket Lamp
If there's a piece of furniture in the game that isn't customizable, but really, really, seems like it should be, it's likely that it's instead sold in a variety of different colors. The Rocket Lamp is one of the bigger examples of this, as it comes in multiple colors but you're stuck with whichever one you can find.
It's certainly possible to get them all, but this design choice can make it frustrating to find the specific color to match your suave, new room, especially when most customizations are simple color-swaps in the first place.
10 Crown & Royal Crown
New Horizons leaves articles of clothing outside of the customization selection and instead provides a ton of different styles of clothing to suit any player. It's completely understandable that not all of them could be slapped with a new coat of paint, but some of them really deserve the option.
The Crown and Royal Crown, in particular, should absolutely give the player customization freedom, as buying either one of them is tantamount to re-buying the first four house upgrades, as they are 1,000,000 and 1,200,000 Bells respectively. If anything, just let players change the jewel color.
9 Pants
New Horizons has more options than ever when it comes to making your own clothing, with a wide range of different top styles to throw on your villager. However, there is no option to create your own pants or add your own details to existing ones, and this, again, feels like an addition that would have greatly benefited New Horizons.
There is a large variety of pants available to purchase in the game, but it may take a while to find exactly what you're looking for to perfect your outfit. No clothes can utilize customization kits either, so waiting for your dream pants to show up at the Able Sisters is about all you can do.
8 Fencing
There are tons of fencing options in New Horizons to keep in-line with the theme of your house/island, such as wooden fences, stone fences, Japanese and Chinese inspired fences, and much more. However, you have no control over the color of these fences, and being able to change it would be the cherry on top of this great feature.
With different color variants, we could see rainbow fences, black-and-white fences, or any other theme that the player can think of. For now, we'll just have to use our paint elsewhere.
7 Shoes
Like pants, shoes are another clothing item with a huge lack of customization that can really hurt the making of an amazing outfit. When starting the game, it may take quite a while to find shoes that match your preferred style, while you strut around the island with blue shoes on a green outfit.
Besides simple color changes, adding tiny custom designs onto them may not seem too practical as they'd hardly ever be noticed, but it would be a welcome touch of detail to the villager fashion scene.
6 More Sofas
As one of the first pieces of furniture that most players will stick in their freshly paid-off house, this one is quite a bummer. Only two sofas in the game are customizable, being the Inflatable Sofa and Log Extra-Long Sofa.
Like the Rocket Lamp, these can be bought in different colors, but only two of them can be taken to the crafting bench. It's always a bummer to have a couch that doesn't match the rest of your room, and it can take quite a while to find a couch to suit it.
5 Light Bulb Colors
No home is complete without a rad lamp or two, and New Horizons certainly has some stand-out ones. The Cherry Lamp, neon signs, and wall lamps are all great to decorate with, but the lighting within your home may get a bit redundant after a while.
Some lamps can have their actual body color changed, but a lot of their light bulbs will remain their original color. Even if it were a simple red, green, or blue option, it would be more than welcome to help add some unique atmosphere that otherwise couldn't be achieved.
4 Ladders
There are a handful of tools in New Horizons that can't be customized, and the ladder is arguably the weirdest exclusion. For starters, this tool is used quite frequently to get around your island, even more so than the slingshot, which is customizable.
The ladder also has the largest surface area out of all the other customizable tools, so changing the color of it is way more noticeable than something like the shovel or net. There's nothing inherently wrong with the basic ladder color, but you can never have too many hot pink ladders in your life.
3 Animal Habitats
Both fish and bugs can be openly displayed both inside and outside and can make for great decoration. Gigantic fish such as the Oarfish are displayed in a small pool, but most fish are placed into a fish tank with a light switch function.
Changing the color of the fish tanks themselves would add a lot more personalization to them, almost like having your very own pet within Animal Crossing (which may or may not be ethical). Customizing the color of the tank's light would be the coolest addition, but, like with the game's lamps, we may never get to.
2 Ocarina
One of the neatest, yet unexpected tools to use in New Horizons is the ocarina, which allows you to stand in front of your villagers and play random notes in their ear until they inform Isabelle that they wish to leave the island. Sadly, unlike a lot of the tools in the game, the ocarina is forever limited to its original color.
The most obvious way to customize this item would be to make the Ocarina of Time from the classic Zelda game of the same name, but any kind of customization at all would be more than welcome.
1 Accessories
Accessories are the last clothing item that cannot be customized and are arguably the biggest contenders for lost potential. The accessories within Animal Crossing vary wildly from glasses to hairpieces to masks, and they would all benefit greatly from some personal, artistic input.
For example, the simple Doctor's Mask could have words or designs on it, as is seen with some fashion trends in the real world. The various hairpieces and wigs could have their colors altered, and glasses could don a flashy, retro look with 3D-glasses inspired lenses.