Animal Crossing: New Horizons Airports May Determine What Color Items Players Get

Animal Crossing: New Horizons players may have discovered a connection between the colors of players' airports on their islands and the colors of the various items they find around their islands. It appears based on the research and tests done by one player that depending on what color your airport is, you're limited to a certain grouping of colors for other items like streetlamps, pools, and other decorations. The hypothesis hasn't been totally proven yet since there are some outliers, but it's as close as any players have gotten to figuring out what determines the colors of items they get.

New Horizons player and Redditor PraiseHolo posted the graphic below to share their findings with the Animal Crossing subreddit based on their discoveries. It shows items grouped together according to airport colors at the top to show what different combinations of colored items players will get depending on what their airport looks like.

Providing some context to the image, the player said they first figured they were onto something about the connection between airports and other colors when they reset the game numerous times to get a certain combination of airport and streetlamp colors. When they weren't able to do that, they cross-referenced their findings with other players' Nook Stop images. It became apparent that there was some sort of relationship between item colors in groups and that the colors weren't entirely random as many players assumed.

Just found out that the color of furniture in Nook Stop is not entirely random, so I made a chart from r/AnimalCrossing

The player concluded by theorizing that an island seed is created when an island is formed with that seed used to decide the colors of furniture pieces and airports.

There are some inconsistencies to the findings though which shows that there are still some parts about this New Horizons process that players don't fully understand yet. Several players commented within the thread that their snack machine colors deviated from the chart shown above which means that while this graphic may come close to figuring out the color groupings, there are still questions let unanswered.

Much of New Horizons' features like this have remained hidden to players until they discovered them for themselves, or at least obtained a general idea of how they worked. Nook's Cranny getting upgraded is just one example of this since it appeared to happen at different times for players, but it soon became apparent the upgrade depended on factors like how long you've been playing and how many Bells have exchanged hands within the shops.

Expect to see more on these color theories and more parts of New Horizons as players continue to dig into the game.