While many players enjoy taking their time and relaxing while building their cozy island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, there are those who challenge themselves to complete everything they need to do in the game as quickly as possible. One of these tasks is to obtain a gold variant of every tool in the game, a task that has historically been tough, but is much different in difficulty in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. As such, the next Animal Crossing should strive to simplify the process of acquiring all the gold tools to ensure that they remain somewhat challenging, but realistic for casual players. Players can prepare enough Animal Crossing Bells in the game.

Since the original GameCube title, Gold Tools have been a rare upgrade to the standard tools in the Animal Crossing series, and the method of obtaining certain tools has been consistent throughout the series, while others have varied from game to game. The advantages of these tools over the standard versions also vary from entry to entry, and Animal Moroi: New Horizons only increases their durability compared to the standard tools. One constant aspect of these tools is how different the difficulty of obtaining them is, which indicates the need for a change in the next title.

Golden Tools are chronically out of balance in Animal Mori

The original Animal Samurai would have some strange ways of getting gold tools, like digging up a buried bell and burying a shovel in a shiny spot and waiting for it to grow into a tree, or getting a gold axe from a wacky elf named Farley to maintain a perfect town after 15 days. Other tools, such as fishing rods and bug nets, maintain the same requirements for obtaining the golden variant throughout the series, namely catching one of each fish or bug, respectively. Obviously, some of the requirements for obtaining a gold shovel are much easier than others such as a gold fishing rod or bug net.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons' DIY crafting system changes the way gold tools are acquired to some extent, requiring players to use gold nuggets and specific tools to craft their own gold tools based on recipes. However, unlocking these recipes requires first completing tasks similar to previous entries, with varying degrees of difficulty. For example, one of the easiest gold tools to obtain is the Golden Axe, which only requires players to destroy 100 axes and can be easily achieved by crafting fragile axes that break very easily.

At the other end of the spectrum are tools like the Gold Slingshot and the Gold Shovel, both of which have very tedious acquisition requirements. The Golden Shovel can only be obtained by helping Gulliver with a recipe mailed to the player 30 times, and even more ridiculously the Golden Slingshot requires the player to shoot down up to 300 balloons to obtain the recipe. Both of these requirements come from events with random elements beyond the player's control, which makes them more frustrating than other time-consuming tasks like catching all the game's fish and bugs.

The next Animal Crossing game should not have specific gold tools locked behind relevant tasks, but should have a system similar to Animal Crossing: New Horizo ns' Nook Miles, which players earn by simply completing daily tasks in the game. Once they reach a certain number of points, these can then be used to unlock the gold tool of the player's choice, giving the player the option to bypass the frustrating tasks required to access some of the gold tools. Even though the number of Gold Tools required to unlock them is quite high, many Animal Crossing: New Horizons players will already have extra Nook Miles before they have shot down 300 balloons. see igxc.com for more details on the game guide.