Crafting a Regression

Not long ago, I wrote that I hoped that Animal Crossing: New Horizons’s crafting mechanics might mean a less random progression in available furniture, and this has turned out to be only a little bit true. You quickly get access to a couple of basic furniture sets based on wood and iron but that’s as far as it goes before becoming random again - because the crafting recipes themselves are doled out mostly at random. So you still can’t really plan a particular aesthetic or take steps toward decorating your house that way.

Perhaps the most annoying example of this I’ve seen so far is the ironwood kitchenette. I’m decorating a kitchen now, I really want to use this particular piece of furniture, and I have the recipe for it. But I can’t make it because it requires two other pieces of ironwood furniture for which I don’t have the recipes - and I am far from being the only person in this situation. All we can do, apart from begging strangers on the internet for trades, is hope we randomly receive those other needed recipes.

I don’t know the reasoning behind this decision. This is now worse than the old random distribution - it’s random distribution with randomly distributed prerequisites. In the old games, I could at least just find a kitchenette without also first needing to find two other specific pieces of furniture before I could use it.