Excerpt

As of this writing Animal Crossing: New Horizons has become a smash hit, one of Nintendo's best-selling games of all time. It's a long time coming for a series that has always had a reputation of being kind of a sleeper. Animal Crossing games usually have a "long tail," a modest spike of initial sales, then a decreasing period of sales afterward, but nonetheless decreasing more slowly than your typical yearly AAA sports title, or whatever brown people the Modern Soldier genre is shooting this fiscal year.

At first it looked like New Horizons was going to follow this pattern, another modestly successful title for Nintendo, not a blockbuster like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey, but not quite a lesser light either, a decent source of profit throughout the remaining lifespan of the Nintendo Switch console. And then the Coronavirus hit, full stop.

The game of the hour, a social game playable over the internet that hit just when social isolation became a great necessity, and played publicly by a number of celebrities, as of May 2020 it has sold over 13 million copies, half of them as downloads (source), greatly outstripping previous titles in the series. (As of November 2021, it has sold 31 million copies, putting it second only to Mario Kart 8 Ultimate in units moved.)

In the wake of this has come a horde of players Googling up advice for how to play, how to take advantage of the game's many systems, and simply how to make a profit selling turnips. It has become a great driver of hits to a lot of websites, including, amazingly, if my own Google searches are to be believed, that of Forbes Magazine. A lot of this information actually has at its root a small number of sources: the work of individual players tirelessly experimenting to uncover the game's secrets and reporting them on sites like the Animal Crossing Fandom Wiki, the work of dataminers like the great Ninji, and the folk behind the Data Spreadsheet, who actually look through the game's files trying to discover things about it that way, and the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Official Companion Guide from Future Press. These other sites endlessly report on the content of these sources, and each other, creating an ouroboros of information, and, sometimes, misinformation.

For example, there is the criteria for achieving a five-star ranking on Isabelle's Island Evaluation. Do a Google search and you'll find a lot of places offering the same info. It's all the same because there is only one good primary source for this information, a sometimes vaguely-worded listing of factors printed in the Official Companion Guide. Dataminers have not extensively looked through this part of the game, maybe because it requires more code disassembly than lower-hanging fruit. So, the information in the book is repeated, again and again, and becomes taken as articles of faith, despite the fact that, in at least one important respect, it is definitely wrong.

How do I know? Because I figured it out myself. The dogma being spread around states that the primary factors of your evaluation are divided into "scenery" and "development," each category earning you a score, and you have to get over a certain number of points in each to qualify for five stars. In those guides, it states that homemade "DIY" furniture is part of the "scenery" category, along with flowers and trees on your island, and implies by its exclusion from being mentioned in the development category that it doesn't play a role there. I know for a fact that it does play a role: I got my island to the absolute border of five stars in development (which is, confusingly, called scenery by Isabelle in the game, but also appears to apply to non-DIY furniture), then picked up a DIY item, talked to Isabelle again, and found my island had fallen to four stars. I then put it back, talked to her again, and found it to be at five stars again. Then I performed the same experiment with a store-bought piece of furniture, and the same thing happened. Clearly, whatever the helpful dog woman bureaucrat calls them, they are counting on the same score. I performed this experiment many times, and am pretty sure of my findings. Something is clearly wrong there. What other information is floating around that might be incorrect? I cannot tell you; it is probable that no one actually knows.

We live in the Age of Misinformation, concerning matters both minor (silly video games) and huge (the need to protect ourselves and others from deadly disease and ways to remedy that disease). It has always been true that information is useless unless we know its source. If you get a tip on a stock, is it a real tip or something someone has spread to inflate its value? The vagueness with which most people treat the sources of their information has become a gigantic problem, and one that threatens, I speak without hyperbole, to destroy the foundation of our civilization. This book is about the silly video game, not the pandemic or politics, but the need for documentation is still there.

Throughout this book, I refer to information both self-discovered and gathered from elsewhere. I have tried to give the most primary sources for it I can find, whether discovered, or compiled, by worthy people. It is difficult to give absolutely every source used in compiling a book such as this, but I have given it a good try. I refer to sources both within the text and in the sources section at the end. Many of the people who have found information reported in this book have their own works to sell, or have Patreons. I encourage you to throw them a bone or two if you have the means. They deserve it.

A Work in Progress

I write this in the period of June through August of 2020; the game was released in late March. Animal Crossing games are meant to be played over long periods, of at least a year, and this one, selling extremely well due to its amazingly fortuitous release at the start of the Coronavirus epidemic, looks like it's going to see updates for a long time. (Update: Nintendo has announced that the big November 2021 update, to version 2.0, will be the last free major update.) Because of this, the reader must recognize that in writing this I'm aiming for a moving target. New elements of the game will almost certainly be released over the coming months; as I write this, one such element, that of swimming in the ocean to look for sea life, was released very recently. Thus, it is impossible for this book to be exhaustive. I cannot write about things that don't yet exist.

Furthermore, even things about the game that are already in it are still being learned. Dataminers, searching the code for the precise algorithms it uses to govern its many systems, are continuing to dive and discover. And because Nintendo continues to revise the game, it's possible that the details of these systems will change. I can only describe these things as they're known to be and are, not what's undiscovered and will someday be.

I plan on posting updates, as they become available, on a page for the book (among other works) at rodneylives.itch.io. Please refer there in future.

Errors are bound to creep into a work of this nature. Corrections should be sent to johnwh@gmail.com, attn: ACNH Guide Correction

Note for 2.0 of the text (and the game)

Nintendo finally released a substantive update, beyond the dribs and drabs that they parceled out for a year and a half, and then announced that this will be the last update. Those who have followed Nintendo for years and decades will not be surprised. Fortunately, there is quite a lot of material in 2.0, and there is also a major piece of DLC, Happy Home Paradise, available either for $25 one time or $30 a year as part of an addition to the Nintendo Switch Online subscription—making the subscription's total cost $50 a year. This version of the book includes new sections covering the additions Nintendo has made to the base version of their weird little anthropomorphic people sim, and the DLC. With the possible cessation of updates, it looks like I'll finally be able to call this book concluded. May it serve you well for years to come.