Island beautification is an important undertaking forAnimal Crossing: New Horizonsplayers, as reaching the coveted perfect island status earns players the recipe for the Golden Watering Can, as well as the chance for the rare Lily of the Valley flower to spawn. A big part of the process of attaining a five-star island is ensuring the island contains enough plant life like trees and flowers. However,Animal Crossing: New Horizonsseems to really want players to have flower-filled islands as planting a few can quickly lead to an overgrown island, making flowers almost as pesky as weeds.
Growing flowers has always been a charming part of theAnimal Crossingseries, typically requiring players to manage their gardens daily in order to ensure their survival. However,flowers inAnimal Crossing: New Horizonsare much hardier, growing and spreading much quicker than in previous entries. While this change can be helpful for players intent on breeding flowers for rare colors, it often results in an island that is so overrun with flowers, it becomes more of a hassle to keep them contained than they are worth.
RELATED:The Next Animal Crossing Game Should Update a Key Part of its Villagers
Animal Crossing: New Horizons' Successor Needs to Tone Down Flower Growth
While increased flower growth rates are a double-edged sword to begin with,Animal Crossing: New Horizonshandles flowersin a way the series hasn’t in the past which ends up making them more annoying to manage. Rather than being able to simply pick up an unwanted flower, players will instead pick the flower currently on the plant and leave the rest of it behind to regrow. Instead of removing the whole plant with this method, players now have to use their shovel to individually dig up each unwanted flower if they wish to dispose of it or move it to a different location.
The thought behind this change is well-intentioned given that it allows players to repeatedly pick rare flowers without having to breed for multiple plants, but when combined with the rapid reproduction rate of flowers inAnimal Crossing: New Horizons, it ends up making the plants more invasive and weed-like than helpful. To make matters worse, flowers have an increased growth rate when watered, and if it’s raining on a player’s island, flowers are going to spread like crazy the next day.Animal Crossing: New Horizons' 2.0 updateadded ordinances, including the Beautiful Island ordinance that makes villagers more likely to water flowers and exacerbate the problem.
Players can try to manage flower overpopulation by using fences and paths strategically, or place trash cans around their island for faster flower disposal, but none of these are long-term solutions. Instead, thenextAnimal Crossinggameshould rework flowers to find a happy medium betweenAnimal Crossing: New Horizons' treatment of flowers and that of past entries in the series. Flowers should either have an increased growth rate or be able to be picked without removing the whole plant as having one or the other makes grinding for rare colors more efficient without causing the headache of dealing with an overgrown town.
Another way overpopulated flowers could be dealt with is similar to the weed pulling serviceLeif offers inAnimal Crossing: New LeafandAnimal Crossing: New Horizonspost-version 2.0. Perhaps players could have the option to hire Leif to automatically pull up a certain portion of flowers in their town and put them in storage for the player to do with them what they wish. This way, players can still replant flowers that Leif inadvertently picked without the risk of losing rare ones while still having a simple way to remove mass quantities of unwanted flowers before they become too much of a nuisance or eyesore.
Animal Crossing: New Horizonsis available for Nintendo Switch.
MORE:Animal Crossing Could Make Good Use of One of Dinkum’s Best Features
