One Feature Is Still Painfully Absent From Animal Crossing: New Horizons' 3.0 Update

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After months of waiting, Animal Crossing: New Horizons' 3.0 update has finally arrived, bringing with it a plethora of highly anticipated features to enjoy. While many of these additions are mechanics players have been requesting for over half a decade at this point, one simple quality-of-life feature still seems to have been painfully overlooked by Nintendo.

As Reddit user SamTheMarioMaster2 recently pointed out, New Horizons still doesn't have any form of durability tracker for its items, which can frustratingly leave you running across your island in need of a new tool. A durability tracker could help you save your hits or plan ahead before embarking on a new island renovation project, so it's easy to see why players think it would be "such a great feature in a future update or new game."

New Horizons 3.0 Still Doesn't Have Durability Trackers

Animal Crossing New Horizons player terraforming and sliding to the side

Item durability as a whole is easily one of the harshest realities of replaying Animal Crossing, especially given how much emphasis New Horizons tends to place on the mechanic by having it affect more tools than just the Axe in past games like Animal Crossing: New Leaf.

Speaking of New Leaf, users like Annuakitty also pointed out that even New Horizons' predecessor already has a similar mechanic that "showed cracks on the tool itself" when it was close to breaking. It's unlikely that we'll see Animal Crossing's unbreakable golden tools make a return anytime soon, but knowing when your tool is going to fail ahead of time is still an incredibly handy feature.

MA2_Robinson notes that New Horizons "feels more like a design game than an Animal Crossing game", highlighting why better tool mechanics almost feel like a necessity for a future update, or at least the next exciting entry in the life sim series.

Animal Crossing's New Update Helps Make Up For Its Absence

Animal Crossing New Horizons two friends hanging out on slumber island

Thankfully, even if New Horizons hasn't introduced new mechanics or features related to tools specifically, the way to craft items in general has been streamlined to make the process even smoother.

If your Axe or Shovel suddenly breaks while running about your island, you'll be able to craft a new one so long as the required resources are somewhere in your house storage, as opposed to needing to hold onto them at all times. Even if it's a simple adjustment, it can save countless frustrating moments or time lost running back and forth across your island, while also freeing up even more inventory space that will come in handy for building your new islands.

While we'll have to wait and see what the future of New Horizons or its eventual sequel brings to the table in the future, there's still plenty of upcoming games to enjoy after you've explored all the new content in Animal Crossing: New Horizons' latest 3.0 update.