Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a wholesome and cozy island living simulator, but it's not always a calming experience. The title continues the franchise trend of pulling players in with cute animal villagers, a vast number of decor and clothing items, and the ability to literally transform the island into almost anything players want. For many, the title encapsulates the idea of cozy gaming, letting fans experience the game at their own pace.

There is no real structure to ACNH, and players can pick and choose what activities they participate in. And, while most interactions in the game are charming and whimsical, no game is perfect. New Horizons has several features and flaws that can make the game feel less like a relaxing pastime and more like a chore due to their stressful nature.

10 The Potential To Accidentally Wipe Away Custom Floor Designs

It's Way Too Easy To Swipe Away Players' Hard Work

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has a custom design feature that upgrades the experience. Players can create their own clothing designs, upgrade certain furniture styles, and even make custom paths and ground decorations to make the island unique to each player. Placing custom designs onto the ground is easy, and can be done either from the custom design menu or from the Island Designer app.

Unfortunately, it's also very easy to remove custom designs in ACNH. Removing a custom design only requires one button press, which prompts the player to kick the design off the ground with their foot. This is the same button that puts sway furniture, cancels actions, and triggers running, making it far too easy to accidentally remove paths and other floor designs. The potential to undo their hard work can lead to some players walking very carefully, always conscious that one wrong button press can lead to annoying patch-up jobs that are anything but cozy and relaxing.

9 One Island Per Switch Limit

No Room For Error When Trying New Things

For many fans, Animal Crossing: New Horizon's biggest flaw is limiting players to just one island. Only one island can exist at any time on one Switch, regardless of which profile is using the device, so anyone who wishes to make another island has to either wipe their existing island or buy a whole new Switch console. This limit is frustrating because it means players have only one chance to get things right.

It also means that making a mistake early in the game, like choosing an unfavorable layout or placing the plaza in a bad location, can't be undone without also undoing hours of playtime. Not being able to experiment, plan, and try different things can be limiting and make it feel like players need to get things just right the first time around.

8 No Visual Indicator On Tools About To Break

Tools Tend To Break At The Worst Possible Times

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has six main tools: fishing rods, nets, shovels, axes, watering cans, and slingshots. All these items are necessary for gathering resources, catching critters, farming, and more. And all these items unfortunately break after a certain number of uses. Upgrading a tool can make it last longer before breaking, but even the highest-quality tools will break eventually. When this happens, players need to craft or buy a new version of the tool.

Many games have tools that require equipment upkeep, so this isn't a feature that's unique to ACNH. However, New Horizons has no indication (written or visual) when a tool is nearing the end of its durability. This can lead to a situation where players are left without the tool they're relying on at an inopportune moment. This is especially true for the slingshot since balloons are a timed event. Item durability is a potentially anxiety-inducing feature that can leave players scrambling to replace their broken tools.

7 The Turnip Market Is Always A Gamble

Players Can Lose All Their Money

Buying and selling turnips on the Stalk Market is supposed to resemble trading in the stock market. Once a week, Daisy Mae the turnip seller visits the island, offering turnips for sale in bulk for around 90-110 Bells. Throughout the week, turnip prices will fluctuate every day, giving players a chance to sell the turnips back for a higher price.

Quite simply, turnips are a form of gambling, as players never know if they'll be able to sell the goods back for higher than they bought them for. To get the best value, players theoretically need to check turnip prices twice a day or find someone else's island offering a better price. They then have to take a gamble on whether they're selling back at the best price or if they should wait for a better offer. At the end of the week, all unsold turnips spoil. The potential to make money is huge, but the potential to lose it is downright frightening. Thankfully, you can use external tools like Turnip Profit, but they still require a lot of manual data input.

6 Pressure To Achieve Perfection

Social Media Is A Double-Edged Sword

The internet is full of amazing Animal Crossing island designs, which is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it means there's plenty of content online to inspire players. There are examples of island designs for practically anything players can dream up. The community is robust and has a huge variety of designs available to browse and attempt to replicate.

On the other hand, these very same inspirational images can have a negative influence on players. Like any social media these days, a lot of what's shared online is not an accurate representation of what things really look like. Many players can get discouraged and overwhelmed when their islands don't look like the images seen online. The discrepancy between how islands look online and what each player's islands look like can prevent players from trying new things or even starting to terraform or design in the first place.

5 Blue Roses Can Take Months Of Preparation

The Amount Of Work That Goes Into Them Is Stressful

There are several types of flowers in Animal Crossing: New Horizons and each variety comes in various colors. Instead of being able to buy flowers or seeds of a certain color, Animal Crossing has a hybridizing system for flowers. Certain flower types and colors, when grown near each other, can lead to flowers of new colors sprouting in nearby spaces.

One of the hardest flowers to create in ACNH is the elusive and beautiful blue rose. Blue roses can add a pop of vibrant color to any island or outfit, but they're incredibly rare and difficult to spawn, sometimes taking weeks or even months of trial and error and hoping for random chance. Trying to make a blue rose spawn can involve some insane levels of planning ahead and math, elements that are decidedly not cozy.

4 Catching Tarantulas & Scorpions Is A Pain

They're Rare And Difficult To Catch

There are many critters to catch in ACNH, including bugs, butterflies, fish, and other marine animals. Some are rarer than others, making them more difficult to catch. None are as dreaded by the Animal Crossing community, though, as the tarantulas and scorpions in New Horizons. Tarantulas and scorpions only show up on the island at night, either in the fall and winter (tarantulas) or spring and summer (scorpions).

These are already rare finds and require players to be logged in at night, but they're also extremely difficult to catch. Unprepared players who don't have a net handy will struggle to catch up to the critters as they run away, while those with a net will be attacked and knocked out, instead. The reward for catching one of these rare critters is large since it allows players to work toward museum completion and can be sold for 8,000 Bells. However, the stressful experience of actually netting one of these bugs might make it not worth the trouble.

3 The Precision Required To Build The Perfect Snowboy

And Get Ridiculed By The Snowboys Upon Failure

During the winter season, players may notice that snowballs spawn randomly on their island. These snowballs can be rolled around, growing as they over more snow. Rolling two snowballs and then pushing them close to each other results in a wonderfully whimsical smiling snowman, known in the game as a snowboy. Building a perfectly proportioned snowboy rewards players with a large snowflake for each day that the snowboy remains unmelted as well as a wintery DIY recipe.

Unfortunately, after the first snowboy is crafted, players quickly learn to dislike the misleadingly cute snow creations. Crafting a perfect snowboy is a finicky endeavor that requires players to be incredibly precise. To add insult to injury, getting the proportions wrong results in literal insults hurled at the player by the misshapen snowmen as they bemoan their hideous existence. The combination often has players dreading an unnecessarily stressful experience.

2 Getting The Right Villagers Takes A Lot Of Luck

Finding A Dream Villager Only To Have The Wrong One Move Out Is Upsetting

When players move onto their new island, several villagers come to live on the island with them. Over time, new villagers arrive or are recruited until the island is bustling with life and 10 total neighbors. In the beginning, when the island still has empty neighbor slots, it's easy to get new villagers to move in. Players can check the campsite on their island or visit a mystery island to search for their dream Animal Crossing villager.

A lot of luck is still needed to get the right character to show up, but at least the island has spots for the villagers to move in if they're finally found. The real stressful part of the experience comes when players already have 10 villagers living on their island. One of the most anxiety-creating situations in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is finally finding the most sought-after villager, only to have them try to replace a beloved existing villager. The process of kicking out a villager can be a long and tedious one, mostly revolving around waiting for your villager to decide they want to leave of their own volition.

1 The Cast Master Achievement Is Nerve-Wrecking

Imagine Getting To 99 And Failing

Nook Miles achievements are special "quests" players can complete in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Most of the achievements are tasks that will be naturally completed by other players, like crafting tools or having a certain number of fossils assessed by Blathers at the museum. There are a few particularly difficult Nook Miles achievements, but none are quite as devious as the Cast Master achievement.

To complete this, players need to catch 100 fish in a row without missing any. This achievement has reduced people to literal tears (including myself) because of how stressful it can be. The fishing minigame is easy to mess up because the cues for catching the fish are so similar to the signs that the fish is simply thrashing about. This can lead to trigger-happy presses before it's actually time to reel in the fish, and doing this 100 times in a row is one of the most uncozy experiences in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.