New San Francisco Animal Crossing Mod Adds Coronavirus Features, Makes It A Pain To Build Anything
UNKNOWN DESERTED ISLAND — The new Animal Crossing game, New Horizons, gained immediate acclaim upon its release as millions of players sought a virtual escape from the boredom of coronavirus-induced isolation. The game plops players onto a deserted island where they perform manual labor to pay off their debts to a tycoon raccoon named Tom Nook.
A group of game developers quickly noticed the depressing parallels between Animal Crossing and reality, and has developed a mod for the new Animal Crossing game that makes it more like the post-apocalyptic San Francisco they know and somewhat love.
The “SF Simulator” Animal Crossing mod is similar to the original game at first, but begins to differ as more residents move to the island. The changes begin innocuously: instead of just building houses wherever they want, players need to seek a permit from Tom Nook for proposed construction that takes a day to approve. Soon, players are required to seek additional permits for harvesting fruits, mining stone, and gathering wood. The associated ecological surveys and permit approval process take an extra day each.
As the island develops a burgeoning fruit export industry and more residents move in, the mod incorporates new social features. Much like the real San Francisco, many new residents congregate around the local campsite or live in tents. Meanwhile, established residents live in furnished houses purchased at exorbitant cost.
Every week, Tom Nook hosts a “town hall meeting” where residents gather to argue about basically everything. In the most recent town hall, residents opposed the construction of a new high-end general store called “Nook’s Cranny,” expressing concerns about gentrification and the “changing character of the local neighborhood.”
We caught up with one player, a tech worker who sneaks in Animal Crossing sessions in between meetings as she works from home. “I don’t get why it takes a week to get through the permitting process and argue with people in the town hall just to put in a bridge on this island. I’m the only one who actually funds the development of this island, and yet everyone else is trying to vote against it,” she told us. “Don’t even get me started on the new people moving into the town. I picked something up the other day thinking it was a tree branch, but it was actually a used needle. It’s just like the real San Francisco!”
Not content with extinguishing the escapist fantasies of gamers worldwide, the developers of the “SF Simulator” mod are now planning to add coronavirus content in their latest update. Among the new activities: building an ad-hoc hospital out of wood gathered from around the island to handle floods of plague-stricken animal patients, new n95 masks available for purchase from the store for an eye-popping 100,000 bells, and an activity where the player can earn money as a gig economy worker delivering food to the homes of the other animal denizens on the island.
