Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ new Polishing Effects spark creativity from players

Publication date of the original Japanese article: 2021-11-16 12:58 (JST)
Translated by. Nick Mosier

Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ new Polish Effects are being used in all sorts of creative ways, media outlets such as Kotaku and Polygon report. Polishing furniture is a new move that was added in the paid Happy Home Paradise DLC. Switch into your cleaning outfit by pressing L, then hold A in front of a piece of furniture to polish it up.

The default polishing effect is Sparkleblast, which makes your furniture sparkly clean by adding a glistening star effect to it.  However, there are multiple effects to choose from such as the Pitterpat heart effect or the Steamshine smokey effect. How you use these effects can open even more furniture coordinating possibilities.

Players have been submitting posts of themselves pushing these effects to the max on Reddit. The video below shows a corridor with a sinister atmosphere. The hallway is lined with suits of armor and strange statues, while a lightning imbued sword sits in the distance. The title of the thread reads, “Is this Animal Crossing?”

If you look closely, you can see the Zappamatic effect being used on the sword and the Gloomswirl effect being used on the gyroids to add to the atmosphere. Adding Steamshine to the armor also gives the scene a sense of depth.

There’s a lot of possibilities with just the preset effects, but it’s also possible to swap out the effects with custom designs. By swapping effects like Sparkleblast and Pitterpat with custom designs, you can make use of the effect’s animation with your own designs.

Here’s an example of a Reddit user swapping out the Steamshine effect to make it something totally different. By replacing it with a fire design and polishing their furniture, it now looks like their home is on fire. Just combining the fading and rising animation of Steamshine with a fire image creates something that looks dynamic.

Japanese Twitter user Ton discovered an unexpected way to make use of the Gloomswirl effect. While it would normally create a moody atmosphere, when swapped with a custom design, it has an animation that looks like something getting sucked inward. Ton added a Waddle-Dee custom design and polished a picture of Kirby to make it look like Kirby is sucking in a bunch of Waddle-Dee.

A lot of examples that are getting laughs are made with custom designs of characters. The below example uses the Steamshine on a bathtub. Normally, the steam would be perfect for something like a bathtub, but this user replaced it with a picture of Sherb. With the images of Sherb’s floating head, it looks like he’s haunting the bathtub.

The Chatterblurb effect is also popular. By default, this effect puts a speech bubble with an ellipsis over an object and has a popping up kind of animation. Japanese Twitter user Kaji replaced this with a custom design of Flurry and tried experimenting with the effect. When combined with the pipe from Super Mario Bros. it looks kind of like a cute jack-in-the-box where Flurry pops out.

When combined with custom designs, Polishing Effects can be used in unexpected ways, and it looks like players are looking further into using them for more than just making their furniture sparkle.