Furniture can't spawn in the ground. However, every day, two trees can have furniture shaken out of them. You shake the tree, a green leaf floats down. You pick it up, it's random furniture. Be warned however. While 10-15 trees also contain one gold coin worth 100 Bells, five trees also carry wasp nests that, when they hit the ground, spawn a wasp that will attack you. It's one of four creatures that will attack in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The wasp will give you a swollen eye. A villager may give you medicine to cure you. (Also there are mosquitoes that don't do real damage, they just stop you for a minute and your villager will remark on the bite. And tarantulas and scorpions, which are mutually exclusive to one another by time of year but only appear at night, which will attack you on sight if you have a net out, but will otherwise retreat from you, and those will KO you, which returns you to your house with no loss of any progress.) You can also cure a wasp bite/sting by waiting a day. And you can avoid getting shamed by villagers with lower friendship by wearing any mask or sunglasses (they won't see the swelling).

Lyman is a cool character, but like any animal villager, it depends on your relationship level with him. You can give already-donated fossils (duplicates) to villagers to vastly increase the friendship. Fossils are worth over 1,000 Bells, so they count as an expensive gift. None of them will be displayed in their home. They are worth a lot to sell, but if you want your villagers to like you, shower them in duplicate fossils. I think once you hit max, it can't go down (or it can't go down very far) but I'm not 100% on that. You know you're at 100% when they gift you a photo of them. They always gift you something when you gift them something, so when they give you their photo for a gift, you've hit 100% and you can stop giving them gifts.

As far as regular attendance goes, Animal Crossing is great for older gamers who are weirded out by social networks. If you think about it, it kind of functions the same way as, say, Facebook, just minus all the political BS, and the consequences with people you know IRL for saying the wrong thing. You have friends who say random things and do random things, and you interact with them and show them your appreciation, and they return it to you. I think it's meant to give that same dopamine hit. Anyway, New Leaf (3DS) is a bit rougher with that. If you don't talk to a villager in a few days, they'll whine about having feelings, too. I'm honestly beginning to get a bit tired of it. These games were big during the pandemic when everyone had to stay indoors and isolated. Now that most people aren't doing that anymore, a game designed to be needy is easier to drop than it is to meet its needs.

They've progressively added storage upgrades (the last ones are not cheap, but at the point they added them I had way more than enough bells and basically nothing else to use them).

I do the whole catalog hunt, so storage was kind of a struggle initially. I don't keep orderable or easily craftable stuff if I don't need it. I just "scan" them by having it in my inventory and then I can re-obtain them whenever I want (easier when you can exchange your finds with other people too). But lots of items are not orderable so those I had to keep. Also lots of bugs and fish for models. Literal walls of cages and tanks crammed on a corner of my island.

But now I am wasting space with the random crap I find and still can't reach the ludicrous new max limit.

Any game that expects regular attendance is an immediate mood killer from me.

This is my biggest issue with mobile games. Log in every day to get a gift, or keep a streak, annoys me too much so I mostly just end up deleting them.

Animal Crossing was different, I mostly played it cause I wanted to, and since whole family was playing it, it was a completely different experience.