Animal Crossing: New Horizons Happy Home Paradise isn’t just about creating perfect vacation homes, you’ve got a selection of facilities to construct too. This means you get to personalise your very own school, restaurant, an Animal Crossing hospital, and, the reason you’re here, a cafe. Here are our top tips for designing the perfect casual dining experience.
1. Pick a cuisine
First things first and it’s time to think with your stomach. The biggest consideration before you’ve even added a single chair is to think about what you’re going to serve in your cafe as that’s probably going to dictate the design and feel of the whole place. One of the biggest additions in Happy Home Paradise is the selection of delicious looking foods that you can create and place in the world. This means your cafe can offer up regular cakes and sandwiches but also delicious bowls of steaming ramen. So head into your furniture options, have a scroll through the different foods and see what you fancy. And if you’re not feeling particularly hungry and your inner barista wants to come out and play, you could always focus entirely on just making the best java possible in a dedicated coffee shop.
2. Place key furniture
Now that you’ve decided on a menu, you’ll want to place the key items of furniture that make up a cafe. That’s just a matter of a cash register, table and chairs so nothing too tricky. And of course these can be in whatever design you like. Now that you’ve decided on your food, you can now build your style around that. Is your coffee shop going to be ultra fashionable with an accent wall of coffee containers and minimalist furniture? Or are you going to go for a classier option with tablecloths for your noodle and sushi cafe? Always remember that there are customisation options in the furniture menu so you can test different wood colours and patterned options to get just the right look. Play with flooring and wall options and don’t forget to head into the wall decor tab to make sure you are thinking vertically too.
3. Remember size and lighting
One of the most important and powerful construction tools is sitting tucked away in your edit screen. When you start Happy Home Paradise, this little menu will just let you change the size of your room but as you progress through vacation homes you’ll unlock customisable lighting and even soundscapes. This means that you’ll probably want to keep coming back to your cafe to see the different ways you can improve things. Whether that’s with a rapid expansion of size to fit in more customers when your imaginary wait list is suddenly too much to handle, adding a nicer hue with some smart lighting, or with the soothing sound of rain or waves, your cafe can always be upgraded in some shape or form.
4. Use partitions and counters
This is a more advanced tip as you won’t initially have both available when you first build the cafe but you can take your eatery to the next level once you have unlocked both partitions and counters. Partitions you’ll already have unlocked by this stage and they mean that you can properly separate your guests from staff and build a kitchen space for perfect food prep. But if you’re looking to create a coffee bar you’ll want to come back to the cafe and upgrade it with counters. These come in two different sizes so you can create an ideal area for premium coffee brewing. Remember too that counters have customise options so you can change the colour of the wood to match your decor.
5. Make the most of the tools
You might already be making the most of all of your design tools but it’s worth pointing out that there are significantly speedier ways of constructing your dream cafe. If you’ve already customised the perfect chair for instance and want to use it everywhere, pressing ZR will copy it and place a replica in the room. This is a great way of cloning custom furniture and also speedier food positioning too. Also worth noting is that if you’re deleting everything and starting again, you can drag and select everything to do a mass delete instead of individually removing things one at a time.
