How to move your home and avoid annoying neighbors in 'Animal Crossing'

A screenshot from Animal Crossing: New Horizons while moving a home
Nintendo
Impact
Updated: 
Originally Published: 

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a source of calm to millions right now. Many of us aren't able to leave the house and enjoy the real world, but who needs the "real" world when we can lose ourselves inside an island paradise with online friends and weird animals. If you haven't yet played, the basic gist is you move to a luxury island in your own modest little tent. You earn cash, or 'bells' as it's known in the game, through collecting resources like fish, bugs, and fossils. Once you've saved enough you can eventually upgrade from your tent to a highly customizable house. But what if you decide you'd like to move once you've built your home? Is is possible to change the scenery and select a new location? We've got all the answers you need to that question and more right here.

How to move your house on your Animal Crossing: New Horizons island

Nintendo

If you want to move your house to a new location, you first need to pay off all the NookMiles you owe your "landlord," Tom Nook. This comes out to a total of 5,000 miles at first, which includes your fees for moving to the island. Once you've done that, you'll have unlocked the game's next important upgrade: the Resident Services building. Here, Tom Nook and the rest of the Resident Services team will offer additional ways for you to interact with the island, whether it's expanding your home, customizing it, or, yes, relocating it.

If you choose the option to relocate, Tom Nook will give you the heads up on exactly how much it'll cost you to do so. It'll be a whopping 30,000 Bells if you know of another place you'd like to put your home. However, Tom won't just move it because you ask nicely. You've got to put the cash up front if you want to see it somewhere else.

Nintendo

Of course, if another villager being too close to the home you've been painstakingly building is bothering you, you can simply ask to have their homes moved instead. It'll cost an even prettier penny to have a villager's home moved, however, at a whopping 50,000 Bells.

It can be difficult to figure out the exact placement for your burgeoning village when you first start playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. For one thing, you don't even have access to your entire island when you first start the game, which makes it difficult to figure out how to approach placement. So you may find that you simply need to do some clever rearranging to make the island over into the idyllic paradise you've always had in mind for it.

In that case, moving everyone's houses around will be a pretty expensive affair, so do your best to try and place homes to your liking before you get too far into your game and see more villagers heading over to your island. You'll definitely regret dropping all those Bells to make things over if you wait too long. Either way, don't fret if your island isn't perfect yet. These things take time — and with social distancing, that's something many of us seem to have a lot more of at the moment.