Now that Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been out for some time, lots of players are sharing their favorite moments. Many of these are times when a good number of villagers come together and start singing or playing instruments. But how can you get this to happen on your own island? It can be a particularly frustrating experience if you don’t know how the villagers function, especially when the answer is so simple. Here’s how to get your Animal Crossing villagers to sing and play instruments together.
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Villagers Congregate Around the Town Square
One thing you’ll learn quickly is how distance from the town hall matters. It’s incredibly rare to see a group of villagers elsewhere on the island. Sure you may see one or two strolling your paths or the island grounds, but they won’t really group up like they do on the town square.
Even if you’ve built an entire amphitheater elsewhere on the island, just waiting for a performance, you’ll likely still see villagers just standing in the square, singing their default song.
Build Your Music Station Nearby
While it’s great that villagers will sometimes set things up in the town square — it’s the only place they can do so — it does mean that you yourself can’t put something down there. Your best bet for getting your villagers to mix things up is set up a music player as close as possible. This will at least solve the problem of them singing the same song all the time. If they want to sing and there’s music nearby, they’ll sing along with that song instead.
It’s not a perfect solution simply because the game requires you to be pretty close to the source of the sound for it to turn off the background music of the game. I’ve spent so much time trying to position myself close enough to the player that it turns off the music but also close enough to the villagers singing. For some reason they can hear the music from way off screen but we need to be within a few blocks.
On the other side of the player you can put down the instruments you have. Occasionally villagers will just walk up and start interacting with them. That includes the drums, keyboard, and even certain microphones. Unfortunately, the villagers will still just sing in the town square even if there’s another villager playing an instrument nearby. But this is the only way we’ve found that actually leads them to enjoying the music together.
I’m all for letting Skye or Claude sing for hours on end, I just wish they’d do it in my little music station rather than in right in front of resident services.
What are your favorite set ups? Thus far we’ve just been plopping down whatever instruments we can find, but share your preferences below!
