Living your best life through Animal Crossing: New Horizons during quarantine

If you’ve ever wanted to live another life, the coronavirus lock-down is the perfect time. While we are all stuck in our homes, wishing to escape and go about life normally again, the new hit Nintendo Switch game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons does just that. It provides just the sort of escape that transports you to a different world and soothes your anxieties about the current state of the world. From museum visits to hanging out with your isolated friends, here is how you can live your best life in lock-down through the game, and maybe even cross off some items on your “things to do when the coronavirus is over” list.

Spend time with your friends

For many, there’s nothing that is needed more than some human interaction. For those who may be in the middle of a 14-day quarantine, or for those just stuck in the house doing their bit to flatten the curve, the lack of contact can take its toll. If you take to Animal Crossing, you can visit your friends on their islands, or have them come to you! You can chat, share presents, give tours, and introduce them to your villagers. An added bonus is when the turnip sale price is high. If your friends list is lacking, you can enjoy your villagers company, and give and receive presents from them.

Go fishing & bug catching

If you have a true love for the great outdoors, you can hit the beach/rivers for tons of fishing, or search the land for some rare bugs. Hopefully, you come across some rare finds, and avoid catching too many Sea Bass on the line, or plain crickets in the net. In the Southern Hemisphere, look for bites from the Coelacanth and Barreleye in the sea, and the Golden Trout in the river. Keep searching for Tarantulas, and try to catch the Orchid Mantis in your bug nets.

Visit the museum

Visiting museums in real life can be difficult if they’re closed due to the coronavirus. Blathers the Owl has you covered in his museum on your island. Filled with your own collections, a museum could rival even those in the real world. If you’ve advanced your museum enough and taken advantage of the new artworks, you can check out the collections yourself, or show your friends how much work you’ve done. Wow your friends, and Blathers, by showing off your full dinosaur skeletons, giant fish, and your colourful collection of butterflies. Add to that the newly added artworks you can collect from Redd the Fox, to expand your museum even more.

Do some gardening

If you’ve lost all motivation for your garden in your lock-down, or you never had a garden to begin with, you can get your digital green thumb going on your island. Using the new gardening resource, Leif, you can plant your favourite flowers in a range of colours to beautify your home. If you plant them right, you can even create some amazing hybrids that make an even more colourful garden. Or maybe pitch black is more to your taste.

GET RICH! 

Using all your skills in the game, sell your creations, fruit, bugs and fish that you’ve caught can make yourself rich. Keep asking Timmy and Tommy at Nook’s Cranny for the daily hot items, and turnip prices (try Turnip Prophet for turnip price help) to end up as a millionaire. Hopefully, you can enjoy your riches enough before you go back to feeding your shopping addiction, and paying off your debt to Tom Nook. It may not be real money, but seeing your Bells savings go up is almost as satisfying as your real ones. Almost.

Re-decorate

The aim of the game is to make your dream island to the best of your ability. There’s so much you may want to do to your own house, but can’t due to the cost, or coronavirus is putting a halt to your current efforts. Animal Crossing lets you customise your whole island, from your house’s flooring, walls and decorations, to the complete layout of your island through terraforming when you have progressed far enough in the game. Organise your town centre with gardens, giant monsters, and stalls to your liking, and even relocate your villager’s houses to create the perfect layout.

There’s nothing worse than being stuck inside with nothing to do, but Animal Crossing gives everyone an outlet for their needs to be out living a normal life. This is a way to escape the boring, coronavirus lock-down, and will have you sucked in and living your best life in no time.