In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you have so many options for interior design that it’s easy to end up paralyzed. Sometimes, all you need are a few tips to give yourself a place to start, and that’s what we’re going for. Here are our picks for the best wallpapers in New Horizons, as of May 2020.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons Best Wallpapers Guide
There are almost 250 wallpaper patterns to choose from in New Horizons itself, before you start investigating fan creations. The lion’s share of the patterns in the base game can be bought straight from Nook’s Cranny; most of the rest are from DIY recipes, or are random acquisitions from Saharah when she visits your island.
Saharah has some of the coolest wallpaper patterns for sale, including most if not all of the animated patterns. You can buy Mysterious Wallpaper from her once per visit for 3,000 Bells, and redeem 5 of her Saharah Tickets for another one, for two random shots at her wallpaper inventory every time she shows up.
Related: New Animal Crossing: New Horizons Manga Series Kicks Off In June
Like her patterns, Saharah’s appearances on your island are totally random and seem to be impossible to predict. However, there do appear to be multiple Saharahs in circulation somehow, as the game treats all of her appearances individually. A Saharah on your island will offer different goods for sale than a Saharah that you run into on another player’s island. If you’re looking to farm for a specific item from Saharah, it’s worth checking with friends and online forums to see if she’s on anyone else’s island. Saharah can appear anywhere on an island and remains there until 5 AM local the next day.
You can also trade with other players for Saharah’s patterns, but expect to pay a bundle. Like a lot of RNG-dependent things in New Horizons, the rarest and most desirable items in Saharah’s inventory can command a high price in trades, Bells, or even in real money. There are eBay auctions running right now for in-game items like the Cityscape wallpaper pattern.
Here are some of our picks for the best wallpaper patterns that are currently available in New Horizons:
Shoji Screen
Nook’s Cranny sells this classic Japanese look for 1,880 Bells. Is it a little weeby? Sure, but lots of furniture goes with it, it’s airy and bright, and it creates a certain illusion of space.
Concrete Wall
If you’d like to make your Animal Crossing house into the dingy gamer basement that surprisingly few people have ever actually had, you need concrete-patterned wallpaper. It can take a lot of finishing work to make a place look unfinished. Pick it up for 940 Bells from Nook’s Cranny.
Skull Wall
Available for 3,000 Bells from Nook’s Cranny, this elegant glow-in-the-dark pattern gives your home a certain touch of Addams-Family elegance. If you’re one of the New Horizons players who enjoys setting yourself and your home up as a creepy contrast to the villagers’ brightly-colored lives, this is an absolute must-have.
Stormy-Night Wall
This is one of the go-to animated wallpaper patterns that made Saharah’s stock so popular. When applied, it paints a picture of an open cityscape along the wall with a torrential downpour overhead, as if your entire house is atop a glass-walled skyscraper. It’s perfect for writing poetry, meditating in silence, or having the boss fight at the end of every Yakuza game. You can pick this up as one of Saharah’s Mysterious Wallpapers.
Server-room Wall
Just because you live in the middle of nowhere doesn’t mean you can’t have a fat download pipe. Another Saharah special, the Server-room wallpaper decorates your house with images of entirely fictional banks of running, animated servers. If you want to make your villager’s house look like some fugitive hacker‘s summer retreat, there’s no better option in the game.
Cherry Blossom Wall
I know I just mentioned the shoji screens are weeby, but the cherry blossom wallpaper is too good to pass up. It’s one of the few animated wallpapers in the game that’s not from Saharah, although you have a relatively small window of time in which you can find it. (Of course, with time travel, that’s not that much of a problem.)
You can find the DIY Recipe for the cherry-blossom wallpaper by shooting down balloons during the short window of time in which cherry blossom trees are blooming on your island; this is either April 1st to 10th or October 1st to 10th depending on the hemisphere you’re in. You’ll also want to save 5 hardwood and 10 cherry blossom petals to make it with.
Skyscraper Wall
Another Saharah special, this wallpaper is perfect for looking out over the city from high above it, a glass of wine cradled in one hand, musing about how everything you’ve done has brought you to this moment.
Mossy-Garden Wall
This is one of the more impressively subtle patterns in the game. Found as one of Saharah’s Mystery Wallpapers, it’s exactly the right shade and texture to suggest you’re in some old, somewhat-poorly-maintained garden out in the middle of nowhere. If you’re going for a sort of idyllic Mary Shelley countryside retreat vibe with your house, and why wouldn’t you, it’s perfect.
Cityscape Wall
This creates a near-perfect illusion that you’re in an urban penthouse apartment with a fantastic view of the city at night. It was even updated a while back so it appears to move with you as you rotate the camera or walk through your house. It’s another Saharah special, and one of the most popular ones at that. If you get hold of this and don’t intend to use it, you may want to see what kind of trades you can get for it online.
Sci-Fi Wall
During meteor showers, when Celeste appears on your island, you can talk to her to get space-themed DIY Recipes like this one. Made with 1 star fragment and 1 large star fragment, the sci-fi wallpaper is made to look like a window in a starship, looking out into the infinite black. It’s a bit of an overall upgrade to those glow-in-the-dark stars you had glued to your bedroom ceiling as a kid. Of course, the relative infrequency of meteor showers means that this is somewhat rarer and harder to make than anything off of Saharah’s list, but you could always get lucky.
There’s a lot to go over with the newest Animal Crossing game, but we’re giving it our best effort. Check out our game hub for New Horizons for more tips, tricks, and articles, including:
- Here’s everything you need to know about the Stamp Rally
- Speaking of time travel, here’s how to use it to “Groundhog Day” Redd into giving you all 40 Paintings
- So who is this Raymond guy that everyone’s after?
In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you can argue that you almost end up with too many options. My houses in these sorts of games always end up looking like a disaster in a thrift store, with too many random items of furniture stacked up against each other. Share your own interior-decorator disasters with us via our official Twitter, @PrimaGames.
