It’s no secret that Animal Crossing: New Horizons has consumed all of my available time. The game has been out just over a month, and at the time of writing this post, I was up to 140 hours played. That is 10 hours off the equivalent of working a 7.5 hour job 5 days a week for the last 4 weeks. It’s no wonder I’m tired all the time.
I joke with my wife when I begin my evening sessions of AC that I’m “Off to work”. But while I have perhaps an unhealthy love of this game, there are other players out there doing things for the Animal Crossing community not just playing the game but creating that are simply mind blowing.
The Stalk Market
If you weren’t aware, Animal Crossing features an actual risk and reward stock market in game. It comes in the form of buying turnips every Sunday and moving them on in the week when the best time to sell arrives before they become rotten the following Sunday. You buy them in batches of 10, and can buy as many as you can afford. The purchase price fluctuates each week, so one Sunday you can buy at 90 bells per turnip which means one batch of 10 sets you back 900 bells. So if you wanted to buy 100 batches of 10 at 90 bells it’d set you back 90,000 bells etc etc. Players then sweat twice a day each day checking turnip sell prices at Nooks hoping for a high sell price. This can be a stressful week and just like the stock market, you aren’t guaranteed a reward for your investment and might have to sell at a loss.
Well, here’s where the community comes in. Some absolute geniuses have created a few differing tools that can pick up in game patterns based on the initial purchase price to determine what kind of week you are likely to have with regards to selling turnips. 2 examples of these are Turnip Calculator & Turnip Prophet.
Both these tools are incredibly detailed using your initial turnip price and the twice daily sell prices from Nooks, it can determine based off of selling patterns in the game just what kind of week your likely to have.
In this instance this week I should be guaranteed 192 bells per turnip (yay profit), but I could reach the dizzying heights of 576 bells per turnip.
I spent 288,800 Sunday on 300 Turnips (96 bells each), if I should be fortunate enough to actually reach 576 bells per turnip I could be seeing a grand return of 1,728,000 bells from a 288,800 investment. Tasty!
Online Shopping
The world we live in right now is very worrisome. There has been a dramatic increase in online shopping while the majority of us are in lock down. Online shopping obviously is nothing new to us, but where we are right now, we’re so much more dependent on it. Well, that is the same situation for the Animal Crossing community.
For every duplicate fossil, recipe or item you get, you can sell on to Nooks for some bells, but probably not as much as it’d be worth to another player in the world, desperate for that last fossil to complete their exhibition at the museum. In comes Nookazon.
As its name suggests, nookazon is a website in the vain of Amazon in which the Animal Crossing community can sell almost anything from their island to other players around the world.
Not for real money before you kick off, but for the in game currency of bells, or possibly miles. There are listings of items, you browse, you see something you like and you contact the seller.
Most items for the now are initially ‘make an offer’, but some users put a desired price or recipe or item they’d like in exchange for their item. It’s incredible. A fully functioning online shop for Animal Crossing, out of Animal Crossing.
For every good… the bad…
I’d like to stress that I do not think that the Turnip Exchange which is our next topic is bad at all. In fact it is incredibly useful and one of the most amazing creations from the Animal Crossing community. Its just this is where you can come across the greedier players of the community.
Turnip Exchange has been created for players to advertise to the world when they have a high selling price on turnips or special item selling merchants are in their town, or even if they are lonely and just want someone to come to their island to hang out.
The player creates a queue system and gives specifications on the max amount of people willing to be on the island at once, how large the queue to wait is and a buy in fee to visit the island. This is where the greed comes in.
If someone is fortunate enough to have a high selling price of turnips, people will fluctuate to their queue to come to the island and sell. Now you don’t need to ask for an entrance fee at all, in fact the polite etiquette of the player selling would be to leave a tip from the vast fortune they would acquire from selling.
But some players will ask for some rather ridiculous entrance fees up front ranging from hundreds of thousands of bells, to high counts of Nook miles tickets or high value items before allowing you to sell your turnips.
What started off as a really nice tool and genuinely friendly people, has turned into a large number of greedy players wanting to charge extortionate rates as they know people will be desperate to sell their turnips at the best price possible.
But that aside, the idea of the site itself is fantastic and incredibly clever to ping you the entrance Dodo code when your time in the queue eventually arrives. Another example of the incredible effort that Animal Crossing players have gone into.
I’ve found most of my dealings have been with members on the forum ResetEra and their Animal Crossing community. I’ve never had issues with anyone there or felt ripped off. In fact in exchange for a fossil I’ve been asked if I could water some flowers on their island in return. Not a likely buy in fee you’ll see on Turnip Exchange.
There are more…
There are so many more useful fan created sites that deserve recognition for different things.
Happy Island Designer, lets you plan out how you want to change your island once terraforming is unlocked and gives you the ability to upload your island map to work with.
Animal Crossing Pattern Tool, lets you upload images and converts them to QR codes you can scan into the game, so you can have your island be one big meme museum.
And be sure to check out the other sites from this post.
So as you can see, the Animal Crossing community are an inspired bunch, who put as much time into their incredible tools as they do into the game. Be sure to check them out to help you progress and make some bells.
– Murr
