“By the way, where was your house at, again? It's amazing how little I remember, hopalong.”
― Claude, Animal Crossing
Claude (ビネガー,Binegā?, Vinegar) is a lazyrabbitvillager from the Animal Crossing series. His initial phrase, "hopalong", relates to the nature of rabbits to hop. He only appeared in the early games of the series, but he returned in Happy Home Designer as DLC and has store items with designs of Nintendo consoles as his furniture theme. He was first available from December 1st, 2015 to January 4th, 2016, and later again from April 1st, 2016 to May 1st, 2016.
Claude returned to the series in New Leaf, as part of the Welcome amiibo update. By scanning amiibo cards, this villager can be met via the campground and invited to the town.
Claude is a brown rabbit with lazy eyes and a unibrow. His inner ears are light blue. His initial clothing is the dark polka shirt, a dark brown shirt (which matches his fur) with colorful polka dots.
Personality
Below is a brief description of the lazy personality. For more information, click here.
As a lazy villager, Claude will be friendly and easy to get along with due to his laid back lifestyle. Like all lazy villagers, he has a love of food and relaxing. He will enjoy partaking in the usual hobbies, usually for relaxing reasons or for food, like when fishing. Claude will get along well with other villagers, but may offend or confuse jock villagers, who have a lifestyle of exercise and fitness, which conflicts with the lazy lifestyle of relaxing and food. He will get along with other lazy villagers with whom he will talk about food, comics, or superheroes. He will also get along well with normal, peppy, smug, and sisterly villagers, and occasionally cranky villagers, but may from time to time annoy snooty villagers, who disagree with the lazy lifestyle.
In New Leaf, Claude's home has a board-gaming theme, with the board game item, donut box, whiteboard, natural table, natural lamp, elegant bench, two elegant chairs, brown seat, rubber tree, potted ivy, and a retro stereo that plays Pondering.
Rabbits are supposed to be really fast, so Claude must be the exception to the rule. He claims that his big ears create so much wind resistance that he can't move fast, but that's just baloney.
While this pun is likely a coincidence, a clodhopper (Claude-Hopper) is a term for a foolish, awkward or clumsy person, which fits the lazy villagers rather well.
Claude's home in New Horizons's has a placement error: when he's working on a DIY recipe, he sometimes has two of the same DIY workbench clipped into each other to make a three-tile-wide work area. This causes the game to get confused and fail to animate him working at the workbench,[3] but he will still give out the recipe he's working on as usual. (It's possible his "working on a DIY" spot is misaligned with his actual workbench.)
In New Horizons, Claude's preferred style is Simple, and his preferred colors are Black/Colorful.