Is anyone here also indebted to Tom Nook?

[yashima]

@mistercrayon

I think if you let the game take a natural course the game balances the characters so you get a mix. I love bianca but I don’t think id want island with 3 or 4 similar animals.

I get it. I had an open spot and I met Bianca and since I already have Bangle I decided against her because it seemed they would have been more or less the same character. I kind of regretted that though because Bianca is really cute and has a pretty house and I spent another 15 nook tickets or so until I ended up with Alice the koala…

My early villagers were all random:

• Louie–a gorilla who is surprisingly sweet, originally I hoped he’d move out but he’s been nothing but nice, gives me a lot of presents and has taught me most of the reactions I have
• Bob–the cat is really weird (he seems to be quite popular which I don’t quite get…)
• Phoebe–she gets on my nerves sometimes
• Wendy–that sheep is just too quirky, I wasn’t unhappy when she was moved out (via Campsite) and she ended up on a friend’s island.
• Molly, the insecure duckling has also left for deeper ponds… she only stayed on my island for a week before she decided to pack it up. Back then I had no idea what was going on.
• Blanche was the last random that moved in–I had 2 open spots at the time and overlooked the second one, but I like her she’s got style

Then I realized I could have a say in who moved in and started looking for cute ones and sometimes they click and sometimes they don’t:

• Lopez–a deer with style and he’s grown on me despite his arrogance,
• Hornsby–who I took some time to warm up to but he’s really cute and made me smile a lot, I really have no idea why didn’t convince him to stay, the rhinos are so cute and he’s the only one I met so far
• Bangle–love her, I’ll never let her move out. Tiger in a cage… I know I know… of all those on my island right now she’s my absolute favorite
• Kidd–similar to Lopez in many aspects but he manages to get on my nerves a lot more and also he is always pretty arrogant towards other villagers especially Stitches. Last week Kidd wanted to move out and I have no idea why I let him stay…
• Stu–that bull lived in a back alley and drank beer all day long and I wasn’t crying when he left. I guess if one wanted to build like an industrial or big city scenery he would be good to keep because the presents he had were fitting for that.
• Stitches–came via campsite and pushed out Wendy so that was good. That tiny psycho teddy is even weirder than Bob. But he looks so cute in his rainbow colored shirt that I have to smile everytime he does his little Naruto run across the plaza.
• Alice–looks cute but took some time to overcome her shyness, I find “normal” personality villagers are quite difficult to get to know

Overall my hits were balanced out by the misses and I found out I don’t always agree with the internet at large or my friends, who play, about who are good villagers to live with.

So I’ve saved a bunch of Nook tickets for tomorrow… but if I don’t find anyone I may have to resort to random.

[mistercrayon]

My personal favourites are Rex a gentle lion who likes bugs, Bianca, Agnes this cute black pig, and flurry an adorable mouse bear. My partner really likes all the frog ones - we used to have cousteau (an original one) but he left but we had wart jr so she wasn’t too disappointed.

[yashima]

@mistercrayon

My personal favourites are Rex a gentle lion who likes bugs, Bianca, Agnes this cute black pig, and flurry an adorable mouse bear.

Isn’t Flurry a hamster? Or is that what you mean with mouse bear?

Anyway, Hornsby (whose German name Rüdiger is just ill-fitting) has moved to my friend’s island successfully and I recruited Apple another mouse bear this morning. I was hesitant because another friend already has her on her island and it feels wrong somehow… but I met her on my third trip out (the other two were Snooty and Becky–who I considered for a few minutes but ended up deciding against her).

I am not sure about Apple but I am never sure about anything relating to these villagers. I discover all kind of weird things about myself in the process of choosing villagers. It is a bit unsettling at times…

[mistercrayon]

Hamster is probably correct

I just couldn’t think what animal it was apart from being a small bear.

[yashima]

I’ve got another rhino on my island this week-end: Spike, a cranky orange punk It seems he took a liking to me as I could already gift him something today whereas Apple who has been there two days before he moved in still won’t take anything from me… but Spike asked me what kind of music I liked and I must have given an answer he liked (Metal obviously–and that’s nothing but the truth).

[superjaz]

Sadly same poster wise of Felicity’s poster.

There is a friendship point system, fruit is a point, wrapping the gift adds a point, furniture is 2 I think, trash is - point, then it’s more animal specific. Once they reached a certain level there is a chance you get a framed photo. After that eventually they might have a though bubble and ask to leave, like they came to make friends, and they did so time to go somewhere else, make new friends

I love my little hamster bears, I have Flurry, Clay, and Apple. On my Island Apple fits right in, though I have a lot of Peppy personalities, Bunnie and Apple, and Merry.

I didn’t really want another peppy, but 30 nook miles tickets and nothing looked good, and someone had Apple in boxes.

I’m using my brothers Amiibo cards to try and get Bill a jock duck.

Luckily a couple years ago I got him some animal crossing Amiibo cards, and now they come in handy.

[yashima]

First time I have a good price for turnips and of course it’s in the morning so my friends are asleep or at work and can’t come over

632 for another 2 hours. In case anyone comes by, here’s the dodo code: BQ9G2
It’s a little busy right now because I’ve put up the island on the turnip.exchange–seeing how many bells I made through the site, I felt it right to give back. Also I’ve already got a few tips from my visitors and I really wanted to know what it is like opening your island like that…

[yashima]

@yashima

632 for another 2 hours. In case anyone comes by, here’s the dodo code: BQ9G2
It’s a little busy right now because I’ve put up the island on the turnip.exchange

And it’s been fascinating.

Since I didn’t ever open my island before I had no idea how to edit the queue size and everything so I had the default settings of 4 people at once and 25 queue.

The turnip economy is completely unregulated and wild. You basically give out the dodo code and once people have it you have no control what they do with it. One can change the code by closing and reopening the gates but that takes forever and with a highprice in the morning time for people to get that price is rather limited already without any interruptions due to the horrible networking code.

The turnip exchange FAQ says this about island etiquette:

• When you are queued up and waiting, be sure to keep an eye on the amount of people ahead of you, and plan to be ready to enter the Dodo Code within a minute of receiving it.
• Once on the island, stay in the queue and only click “Leave Queue” after you left the island. Otherwise, the next person in line is going to get the Dodo Code before they should can it can cause delays.
• Be sure to follow the rules your host created if they have any in the description.

Islands often add the following rules:

• always leave via airport because otherwise it’ll reset the game for everyone on the island to whatever the last safe state was
• don’t give out the code to other people
• don’t do multiple trips, allow others to sell their turnips as well
• tips are appreciated

So my visitors were on a nice bell curve regarding the above. At the upper end they are quick, do one trip and leave a tip (mostly 99k bells or 1 NT). On the lower end they make multiple trips or give the code to their friends and stay in the queue forever blocking others… luckily I can at least remove them from the queue so the next person can get the code.

I had my island open for 3 hours as an experiment, I had closed off everyting but the shops with fences in an attempt to get people to concentrate on what they were there for (selling turnips).

632 is a rather high price. I think the absolute maximum possible is 660. Even using the exchange my best so far was 599 and usually I get around 450. I always buy one full inventory of turnips and made 2.3 mio bells from turnips and another 2.2 mio bells and 8 nook tickets in tips. Which goes to show the upper end of the bell curve is rather generous seeing how many people don’t tip and how stressful it is to have the island open, I am glad I’ve always left a tip when I used the site.

Nevertheless the people who did repeated trips–I counted up to 4 for one person–were stressing me out. Prices change at noon and I closed my queue around 10:40 or so and that wasn’t enough time to get all 25 remaining people queued through my island because of the lower end of the curve. And that is unfair. And there is nothing I can do about it because the game was never built for this type of thing. All in all I had to pay attention to the game the whole time…

I see this as far more than “just making a few bells in a game”. I used to play the WoW auction house quite a bit years ago and I am fascinated by game economies because they follow their own, often quite different rules. The emergent behaviors and etiquette surrounding these economies are just something that makes me think.

[COMaestro]

Fencing off your island has gotten trickier according to my wife (@superjaz), as with the new update, visitors can enter the water from the airport dock, thus swimming around to your fenced off areas. Unless you got the whole island, in which case, nice work!

[superjaz]

I’ve never used the exchange, heard of it though. I don’t think I could do it with kids under foot.

I’m in 2 face book groups, one smaller.
I post there, my price, tips welcome not needed (and maybe a few things I’d like ). And all their Island name (so I can recognize anyone who tries to sneak in by being given a code.
And people post, I message them the dodo.
Sounds like more work then it is because FB messager its pretty fast.
I had 630 today and been on an hour. Maybe 10 trips in. Been gifted a couple clocks, 10 nook tickets and maybe a mil Once I got 5 gold nuggets which was awesome.

I’ve got enough $ in the bank from others letting me sell at an awesome price, and most weeks I get to see shooting stars at least once, so I try to share back when I can.

I need to check if you can swim on others islands but yeah jumping off the airport is possible.
I have to be careful, I have no storage space and lit gold money, stars everywhere

[yashima]

@COMaestro

Fencing off your island has gotten trickier according

Well if they jump off the dock they cannot get to the shops, so …
Also there aren’t any areas that should have caused trouble. My stone garden is fenced in separately. As far as I am aware they cannot just take a shovel to your flowers which is what I would be concerned about most (I still haven’t managed blue roses and green whatever those are called)

[yashima]

@superjaz

I’ve never used the exchange, heard of it though

I’ve been using it on and off. I don’t have facebook anymore and I don’t want to post on reddit. The exchange facilitates an almost anonymous trade which is how I like it

I think people taking advantage of others by going against “etiquette” are doing everyone a disservice and if the percentage of idiots becomes to large it will kill the site… but by and large for now it seems to be working and the non-idiots make up for the idiots.

[superjaz]

I had this happen with a visitor today. They rushed and said they accidently went into the water. But I can’t remove fence with visiters present so they were stuck. Sadly like mins before the price change.

I know people who have money trees as decor and or worry about people picking gold flowers, or collecting their rare beach shells or recipes.

I did really well over all, a bit over 2 mil, 10 star pieces, and 11 nook tickets and 6 gold nuggets in about an hour n a half with no tips needed (but welcome) oh and 2 cuckoo clocks.

[superjaz]

This will probably be working for another 25 mins as my son is making reactions at the dodos, have Saharah and Celeste, no shooting stars tho

[yashima]

I was asleep asleep…

I took it upon myself to solve the puzzle that is my weather seed.
It took me quite a while though.

here's how I did it

• There’s an app that helps you: the Animal Crossing meteorologists
• It took me several hours to “solve” this and I learned: Quality > quantity. Correct data is more important than lots of data.
• make notes of your weather somewhere other than the app first, there really is no backup and it’s likely you want to start over several times.
• It’s really hard to distinguish between different types of rainy weather and different types of cloudy weather. I had put a lot of cloudy that was actually sunny. I ended up putting “unsure sunny/cloudy” a lot.
• The only thing that is easy to determine is “clear” because zero clouds are zero clouds.
• I used screenshots I took and ignored the weather from my first week on the island.
• Don’t attempt to use anything other than the full hour +/- 10 minutes.
• Don’t use images where only a small portion of sky is visible.
• Best thing is if you know when you had previous star showers occurring or Celeste visiting (you don’t need exact shooting star timestamps).
• If for some reason you do not have enough photos. Don’t track data in the app directly, spend a few days taking pictures at full hour with the sky clearly visible before starting with the app. 3 photos a day usually narrow down the pattern enough. Good times to take pictures seem to be around noon.

The amount of data I needed was 3 star showers / Celeste visits and ~30 data points from around 14 days (non-consecutively). So in all likelyhood if you regularly take photos in the app you have enough data already.

It accurately predicted a minor star shower the next day down to the minutes and seconds of each shooting star.

It takes away the continued disappointment from missing star showers or not having any. It also predicts rainbows. After that one star shower I finally had 2 of the constellation fragments and a lot of small fragments ~15 and I know I’ll have a lot more chances in August.

This is in the same league of course as optimizing your rotation in World of Warcraft or mathing out other games, so if that’s not your thing, don’t do it. Some of the mystery of a game is lost along the way.

[yashima]

My Dream Address :)

[superjaz]

Shooting stars probably on the next 30 mins

[superjaz]

My son and I checked out your island.
Your rock garden is awesome, that is the dream.
I really need to make a dream code so I can show off my dumpster fire.

[yashima]

Thank you it took me about two weeks and a bunch of putting down patterns everywhere… I saw the idea on polygon and copied it. I really need to update my dream. But I haven’t made that many changes recently.

Ever since I have the rock garden enough I haven’t needed rocks that much that’s the irony of going to such great lengths to make them easier to obtain.

The autumn event isn’t quite convincing me to collect pinecones. I may not have enough trees except in my orchard.

Ps: Also there are no kids on the island with me. Everyone I know besides me is playing with a child or two and that changed the whole approach to the game it seems… one friend’s daughter cut down every tree on the island and declared she was very strong…

[superjaz]

I about paid for my son’s house and he deleted it. As is I live in fear of him doing that to the whole island. At the end of the day I try to go on his account and empty his pockets. He also loves to release any caught creature so I have to make sure I don’t leave them out.

I am terrible at seasonal stuff collecting. Last shooting stars I just asked people to bring it if they wanted to tip.