To fully express yourself to your villagers, you’ll need to unlock the full suite of Animal Crossing: New Horizons reactions. These reactions are little visual representations of your daily range of emotions, and let you properly emote what your current mood is to your fellow islanders, and anyone else who might be visiting.
There are over 40 Animal Crossing: New Horizons reactions to unlock, and they range from simple things like ‘greet’ or ‘laughter’ to more complicated emotions like ‘aggravation’ or ‘distress’. You can use them near another villager to interact with them. See a horrible tarantula scuttling around your island? Use the fearful reaction. See a pretty butterfly flutter on by? That’s the glee reaction, surely? Anyway, you get the idea.
Thankfully, it’s really easy to start building up a library of emotes, as you can simply get them by playing the game and talking to your fellow villagers.
You’ll get your first one as early as day four in my experience. Just pay attention to any villager calling to you by name. Stop to talk to them, and you may get gifted a reaction. If you play regularly, you’ll start earning a handful of reactions a week – roughly one new reaction every other day at first – meaning you’ll soon be able to better represent all of your various feelings more quickly and efficiently.
How to use Animal Crossing: New Horizons reactions
If you’re feeling the need to really emote, you can access all of your Animal Crossing: New Horizons reactions by pressing XR. This will bring up a quick access wheel that houses eight reactions. You can select the one you want to use with the left joystick, and then unleash it on your island with a quick tap of A.
If you have more than eight reactions to your name, you can press Y to see them all. From there, or from the reaction wheel itself, you can reassign any that you’re not aligning with, and put them in the quick access wheel. From the library screen you can also press Y to try any on for size too.
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons tips (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons DIY recipes (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons fish (opens in new tab) guide
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons bugs (opens in new tab) guide
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons Nook Miles Rewards (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons iron nuggets (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons vaulting pole (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons shovel (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons ladder (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons fencing (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons magic wand (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons Isabelle (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons Resetti (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons KK Slider (opens in new tab)
- How to evict a resident in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons amiibo (opens in new tab) support explained
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons museum (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons tailor (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons shop (opens in new tab)
- How to improve your Animal Crossing: New Horizons island rating (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons Island Designer app (opens in new tab)
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons character customisation (opens in new tab)