Animal Crossing: New Horizons‘ Happy Home Paradise DLC is all about building homes for friendly villagers. Some ask for private villas where they can read and relax until they’re ready to rejoin the real world. Some ask for metalhead abodes where they can rock out and play guitar where nobody can hear them. Then, there’s Lionel.
Lionel is a smug lion villager with a royal wig hairstyle and a waistcoat that marks him out as a very fancy gentlemen. He’s a lion of taste, and has a real sense of style.
In Happy Home Paradise, all he wants in the world is for you to make him a toilet room.
While other villagers greet you with a smile and a sane request for a humble abode, Lionel has no qualms about being very, very strange.
As pointed out by Frog Detective creator Grace Bruxner, Lionel will appear by chance on your work island in Happy Home Paradise and say, ‘You can never have too many toilets when company’s over.’
These one-line requests typically guide what a villager wants you to build, and encapsulates their perfect ‘dream home’.
For Lionel, his dream home is a room with lots and lots of toilets.
Now, it’s important to note you can’t install doors in an Animal Crossing home. The new update means you can install short feature walls, but nothing that’ll prevent people from seeing you on the toilet. There are shoji screens that can be used for privacy but for the most part, using a toilet in Animal Crossing will mean the whole world is watching. (Technically you can only sit on a toilet in the game, you can’t actually use one.)
Having multiple toilets in a home makes it even more difficult to create a sense of privacy.
Read: Animal Crossing: New Horizons — a retrospective at the end of the road
But Lionel? He’s a man of taste and refinement. He knows that going to the bathroom is natural, and should be celebrated. His dream home includes multiple toilets, and he’s proud of it.
Deep down, we all know he’s right.
When you have company, the last thing you want is to be waiting for the bathroom. It can cause a whole lot of mess. So while Lionel is very brusque with his toilet request, it’s hard to deny his request is practical.
Twitter user Molly Carroll also had a run in with this toilet-loving lion, and ultimately ended up building him a urinal-filled abode. Despite the challenge, she also managed to create a nice sense of privacy with a retaining wall that blocks off the urinals from the rest of Lionel’s chandelier-topped home.
It’s a bold build, and one that shows off the home-building variety in Happy Home Paradise. There’s plenty of challenges to tackle, and many that include some weird and wonderful quirks.
So far, it does appear Lionel has the strangest request amongst the villagers in Happy Home Paradise, but given there are hundreds of homes to build, it’s likely there’s some other weirdness waiting to be discovered.
If you’re looking for more things to ‘do’ in your Animal Crossing: New Horizons adventure, creating a toilet home for Lionel might be just the thing you need to keep your excitement about the game going.
