Why does Animal Crossing: New Horizons only allow 10 villagers on an island?

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has several different factors that make it so popular within its community. However, one of the most common factors that the community loves is the vast variety of villagers available for players to interact with in the title. Nintendo has over 397 different villagers for New Horizons players to choose from.

Given the wide variety of villagers available for players to choose from in the title, it seems to be a rather tight constraint that players can only host ten villagers as residents on their island. Here is why Nintendo does not allow more than ten villagers to reside on a player's New Horizons island.

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Why Animal Crossing restricts players from having more than 10 villagers on their New Horizons islands

One of the most common complaints that New Horizons players have with respect to the game is that it does not allow more than ten villagers to reside on a player's island. Nintendo has a set of reasons for not allowing more than ten villagers on every player's island.

First, every New Horizons island has a very limited amount of space on it, of which a specific part is dedicated to the different important buildings in the game like the Resident Services building, the Able Sisters' Shop, and the Museum, to name a few.

Keeping this space aside, players have to build spacious and comfortable homes for themselves as well as their resident villagers. Under these circumstances, allowing more than ten resident villagers on every island will make the space cluttered and crowded, ruining the comfort and visual appeal of the island.

A crowded island can ruin the visual appeal of Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Image via Twinfinite)

Second, New Horizons villagers are divided into eight different personality types. This gives players the space to have a resident villager of each personality type and two villagers of duplicate personality types.

Having more than ten villagers on every New Horizons island would increase the chances of conflict among villagers since there could be villager personality types that do not get along with each other.

Furthermore, the limited number of villagers on every island encourages players to keep rotating the villagers they have on their island, inviting different sets of villagers to reside on their island every once in a while. This also ensures that players interact with a large number of the villagers available in the game.

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The decision to allow only ten villagers to reside on every New Horizons island is a well-thought-out one and benefits the player, making their life on the island a lot easier and more interesting.