Animal Crossing: New Horizons Finally Lets You Decide Where New Villagers Houses Go

It’s the bane of every Animal Crossing player’s existence. You work and work and work, building the perfect home, tending to an orchard, and meticulously planning out every single detail of your town. Then some new person comes to town, plops their house in the middle of your beautiful apple orchard, and ruins the whole thing. That may be no more though once the newest game in the series arrives. Animal Crossing: New Horizons finally lets you decide where new villagers houses go.

Find the perfect place for their house as well

The info was revealed in a section of today’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons Nintendo Direct. Speaking of how you choose your own living place, the video goes over your tent and how that works. It then pivots to talk about other residents, saying “If they’re not sure where to move, please look and find the perfect place for their house as well”. If my memory of the franchise is right, this would be the first time players are able to do this outside of specific events, at least officially.

In the past, villagers would arrive and move in wherever they wanted. Some restrictions were eventually put into place, with New Leaf making it so new residents wouldn’t plop their house on specific areas. Paths, for example, could be setup to force them to move into at least specific zones of the map. But now that won’t be necessary at all.

New villagers seem like they’ll seek you out and offer the option to pick a housing location for them. Speak to them and they’ll hand you their tent. Place it where you feel is best and that will eventually turn into their home. How long will you have to activate this? We’ll find out more when Animal Crossing: New Horizons hits Nintendo Switch on March 20th, 2020. UPDATE: It looks like you can also decide ahead of time where newly arriving villagers houses will go, so that would make it very easy to plan out your village.