Tag: animalcrossing

Musing About the Animal Crossing New Horizons Update

Years after Nintendo announced that Animal Crossing New Horizons wouldn’t get any updates following the 2.0 one that also introduced the Happy Home Paradise DLC, and underlined it by not even releasing any New Years arches after 2021, they’ve gone back on that statement, announcing that in January there’ll be a Nintendo Switch 2 paid upgrade (only $5 this time), as well as a free 3.0 feature update. As they tend to do now, they announced it in a video, not a Nintendo Direct video, but still (12½m).

There was a time when I would have been thrilled to hear about this. I did, after all, write a guidebook to AC:NH, the “Black Book of Animal Crossing New Horizons,” which I still sell at itch.io. It contains an absurd amount of material. I suppose now I’ll have to update it again, but I’m feeling ambivalent about going back to the island paradise, despite the fully-upgraded house and tens of millions of bells I’ve left there.

Animal Crossing New Horizons holds a special place, not just in the series history, but in video gaming history. Incredibly, it’s the second best selling game on the Switch, at over 48 million copies, and it has the pandemic and the concomitant lockdown to blame for it. It outsold all of the other Animal Crossing games put together, going all the way back to Gamecube (and, in Japan, the N64) because a lot of people, for a time, used AC:NH as a replacement social scene, a kind of mini-MMORPG, focused not on fighting fake monsters in a bullshit fantasy world, but on decorating fake houses and islands, in a different kind of bullshit fantasy world.

And I think that’s okay, despite my use of profanity! Of course video game worlds are bullshit; that’s what they are made of. They’re all fake, they’re mere bits and bytes, but if you have a group of friends who pretend they’re real, then they gain reality from it, substance granted from their shared experience.

Well, the people are gone. I can’t expect that even a small fraction of the players it had back then are still invested in it. A few will return for this, surely, but without another lockdown it’s impossible to expect it’ll come anywhere close to it.

And even if they did… I think I’m done with Animal Crossing. Not just New Horizons, but Animal Crossing in general, even with the idea of Animal Crossing. The grandmothers who famously played the various versions, who the media happily reported on as a kind of uplifting story, they’re gone now. What happened to their memory cards, I wonder? Do their descendants load them up from time to time, pretending to be their grandmum, to falsely reassure the animals they still love them? Do they keep it as a kind of museum? Do they put it in the attic, maybe for future generations to discover, assuming their consoles still work, or sell them?

These are all troubling thoughts for me. Recent events have reminded me that life is finite. I still play video games, for my own reasons, but I don’t think I can appreciate, that I can afford, another huge timesink game like Animal Crossing, whether it be New Horizons or anything else . If I knew many other people who still played then maybe I could muster the will. I was on a Discord of Metafilter members who all played, but I left it over a year ago, before I knew they’d revive it, to clean up my server list. (Discord limits the number you can be a member of, you know. It’s higher if you play for their much-loathed “Nitro” feature, but I condemn that to extra hell.)

If this changes, I’ll let you know. The book could still use updating. But the joy in it has left me. Sorry critters; it was fun for a while.

Hunter R’s Curosities of Animal Crossing City Folk

Still in a low-effort mode due to upcoming events out here, but we love gaming esoterica, so here’s Hunter R’s newest video on Animal Crossing, here about the Wii version, City Folk. (14 minutes)

Highlights are details on City Folk’s letter scoring system, music in the game that can be heard but is really hard to listen to, a couple of softlock bugs, and info on how Nintendo distributed custom items via WiiConnect 24, and its unexpected relevance to The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

HunterR: Reading A Sign 43x Makes Your Axe Extra Durable In Animal Crossing

It is as the title says. It’s been discovered that, in the original Animal Crossing on Gamecube, if you read the village Message Board 43 times, it’ll reset your axe’s durability. But there are more consequences than just that! It’s explained in HunterR’s 10-minute video.

So, why does this happen? The precise details are in the video, but here’s a summary.

When you’re holding an axe, the game is not discriminating about which A button presses cause it to degrade—or, rather, its damage value will increase. If you hit objects other than trees, it’ll pick up three times as many damage points. But you can do other things that use the A button, and if an axe is in hand, its also take on damage.

There are actually eight different axe objects, that are switched between when eight points of damage is taken. (The more damaged versions have slightly different appearances.) The damage counter isn’t actually tied to the axe: it’s a separate count that’s counts for all axes. (Meaning, if you have multiple axes and try to spread out the wear between them, technically only the axe that you’re holding when you take the eighth damage point really gets harmed.) The value is also not saved when you save the game; if you hit trees seven times with an axe, then save and reload, the wear will be forgotten.

If you do something with the A button while the axe is in hand, but it doesn’t strike an object that might cause it to break, it’ll keep gaining damage. If you’re facing an object that isn’t a tree, like the Message Board sign, it’ll even gain three as much. But the check that switches to the next-most-damaged axe type only happens when the axe actually hits something. (It also happens if you open doors with an axe in hand!)

The counter to check if the axe should take wear is a single byte interpreted as a signed value, so, if you can get it to 128 or higher, the high bit is set, so the C library code used for the game’s comparisons will consider it to be a negative number. 43 x 3 is 129, or -126. You can then keep using the axe over and over until the number turns positive again, at 0, or until you save the game and reset the counter anyway.

By the way, to bring this to the realm of things I have personal knowledge of… Animal Crossing New Horizons doesn’t have a similar bug (as far as I know at least), but there is a different unexpected aspect of its tool-breaking. If a timer is running, like from hitting a rock for Bells or from participating in a round of a fishing or bug-catching tournament, tools won’t break until the timer expires, even if they exceed their durability limit. It’ll count the damage, but it won’t actually break the tool until the timer runs out. If you don’t use the tool in a way that might cause it to break, then it won’t, not until you next use it. If you’ve kept track of how much wear it’s taken, you can then sell it at Nooks and get some of the value for it.

What Nintendo Games Do When You Delete Save Files

I know, lots of posts on this blog end up being about Nintendo in one way or other, but their corporate stance of toymakers, regardless of its truth, means they often do interesting things, and one category of those things is having special animations when you delete save files. But deleting save files is destructive, obviously, so many people never see them. Here’s a video compilation of some of them. Of particular note is the deletion process of Animal Crossing games (yes, them again!), and of all of those there’s the one for the original Gamecube version, which pretty much implies you’re killing your village’s inhabitants. A pretty heavy trip to lay on a kid! Here’s that video, from Nintendo Unity (9 minutes):

Gamecube Animal Crossing’s e-Reader Cards

There’s been rather a lot of interesting Animal Crossing items to share lately, many of them from the Youtube account of Hunter R, who specializes in AC. He presents the video in today’s find, which is about an interesting relic from Nintendo’s Gamecube era: the e-Reader.

The e-Reader uses a variation of the technology used in QR codes. QR codes, surprisingly date back as far as 1994. Old-time internet layabouts like myself remember the CueCat, a special barcode scanner that was given out for free, under the assumption that they could make money off of them from advertisers using their tech to encode URLs to their sites in their print ads, then users could scan them with their CueCats to jump immediately to their sites. Yes, this was a business model that people once thought could work. Maybe it could have at one point: that’s the major use case for QR codes now.

The e-Reader was rather different. A Gameboy Advance peripheral released in Japan in 2001, and the US in 2002, it could scan tiny dot patterns printed on playing card size pieces of cardboard. Whereas QR codes are intended for small amounts of data like URLs, a single e-Reader card could hold 2,112 bytes of data. The hardware itself had a ROM built-in that contained an NES emulator, so one of the things that could be distributed, on small decks cards, were smaller NES games like the black box series. I had an e-Reader myself back then, and while it’s long since misplaced and probably lost for good, I still have an officially-released pack of cards somewhere with Balloon Fight on it, and also the weird e-Reader variant of Mario Party, which I think I’ve only ever had the chance to play once.

The e-Reader was one of Nintendo’s shorter-lived play experiments, and didn’t last long. But one of the most interesting releases for it was a large sequence of Animal Crossing cards. There were hundreds of these cards, and they were kind of like an early version of the current-day Animal Crossing amiibo cards. It’s amazing there were so many, because the hardware requirements were significant: you needed a Gamecube and GC Animal Crossing disk, of course, and the e-Reader, and a Gameboy Advance, and a GBA/GC link cable. And the cards themselves, of course.

The cards could be used to get all kinds of items in your Animal Crossing village, depending on the card. The amazing thing about the cards is that they seem like they’d be the kind of thing that would have been quickly cracked and turned into a way to obtain arbitrary objects, like the never-released Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda NES items in Animal Crossing, but were in fact only broken fairly recently.

The 11-minute video linked here explains how they worked and how they were cracked, and also links to a GitHub repository with program that can be used to generate your own cards. But Hunter R. has been on this beat for a while, and has two other videos on the subject you can peruse if you wish, on generating custom villagers with cards (12 minutes), and generating Super Mario and Zelda NES items (18 minutes). The villager one is interesting because you can make arbitrary villagers with it, with appearances and names not among the ones included on the disk, although only using the Japanese version of the e-Reader. Even you don’t have the magic combination of gadgets to make practical use of them, they’re interesting watches to understand how the e-Reader worked, and how it was, eventually, exploited.

How Speedrunners Pay Off Their Animal Crosssing New Horizon Debt Quickly

Argh! This video from Press A! on Youtube promises big by promising to explain how speedrunners blast through the over 5 1/2 million Bells needed to fully upgrade their (pre-2.0) house in Animal Crossing New Horizons, but then in typical game Youtuber fashion they explain nearly everything else about the game, the debt, and all the other things speedrunners must do along the way! Here is the 12-minute video, but I’ll give you the gist below:

First: the glitch only works on version 1.2.1 or earlier, so nowadays it requires hacks to downgrade your Switch to do them. And the trick also means having at least two users on the same Switch, both with residents on the island.

The trick involves duplicating items, then selling the duplicates. The items are duplicated by putting an item that can have other objects put on top of it, like tables or the cardboard boxes in the Recycle Bin, down near the border of the town square area.

First, an expensive item is put on the table or box. The Switch promo item given to the first player upon starting the game is typically used by runners. Both players are brought in, then the second player spins the box while the first player picks the item up off of the box. If done on the same frame, Player One will pick up the item, but Player Two’s rotating of the box will mean it also remains on the box. Now there’s two copies of the item. This process can be repeated immediately, filling up Player One’s inventory with the item. They then sell the items for profit, and continue.

I miss the days when you could just find this out from a text file on GameFAQs, but then tricks like that are a lot harder to discover randomly these days without something like Youtube’s discovery algorithm to uncover them, although it too is random and scattershot, or else following a ton of Discords to seek out all of the little gaming communities where all this data is hoarded.

So that is how they do it, but since it’s specifically on an old version of the game that you can’t even play anymore it’s of limited use to normal players. New Horizons changed so much in that first year that this information is largely of use as a curiosity unless you’re involved in the frankly bizarre speedrunning community.

My own trick for paying off your house means breeding expensive roses, ideally blue but black will do, then growing tons of them in the fields of your island and selling them. If you have the DIY recipes to make wreathes or crown from them, then it doubles their sale price. It won’t pay off your house of in under two hours, but if you can get your starter roses from elsewhere, you can pay it off much faster that way, maybe in a couple of months. I’ve explained the details of that process before, and in multiple places, but hey at least I didn’t just post it in a Discord where non-obsessives will never see it.

There, that’s my annoyed internet oldbie rant for today. Come back tomorrow where I’ll shake my fist at something else, probably AI slop. Ta!

The Letter-Writing System in Gamecube Animal Crossing

I’m opening this post with a special message to any anthropomorphic animal video game characters who happen to be reading this. As we will see, they rate this special prologue quite highly, and so it will make us very popular to any Dottys or Apollos in our audience, being exactly the sort of thing they want to hear. In the secret, inner language of their minds, I’m sure it confirms all their biases and makes them feel good about themselves:

I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.

Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series has a lot of weird systems in them. Some games wear the grass down according to character walking patterns; all the games have the “Stalk Market,” a risky way to make a lot of money; most of the games have a lost-and-found; and so on.

A system that was in the first game, and I’m not sure was ever adapted for later games (but then it might have been) was letter-writing, not just to other players in the same village, but to the villagers. They’d save the letters you wrote them and show them off to other players if they moved to another town, and even write you back. Of course, parsing and intelligently responding to any text, no matter the language, was beyond computers of the time (and despite what AI enthusiasts will tell you, still isn’t), so the game has to fake it in some way. But, how?

Well, what is the purpose of writing letters to characters in the game? It gives villagers something interesting to show people when they move to their villages, and, it’s a roleplaying exercise for the writer, a way to pretend the animal denizens of your town are real people and not simulated game mechanics present to make the game seem less empty.

Both of these design goals work best if the person writing the letter actually writes real letters, and not random jumbles of characters, so Animal Crossing has a mechanism to reward players for writing what appear to be real letters, and not placeholder gibberish, and its system of ranking text to attempt to reward actual letter-like writing is quite complex. It looks for punctuation that looks generally appropriate, capital letters after sentence-ending punctuation, triples of characters that commonly appear in English, and sequences of characters followed by spaces that approximate the word lengths of English. Of special interest: these are elements that have to be tweaked by language, and so they pose a special challenge to localization.

Hunter R., popular Animal Crossing Youtuber, released a video that explains exactly how GC Animal Crossing scores letters written to villagers. As it turns out, the text that scores the very best looks a lot like that in the preamble to this post, up above. Go figure! Here is his description (10 minutes):

How Villagers “Read” Your Letters In Animal Crossing (Youtube, 10m)

EDIT: My mistake! Originally the villager-friendly message near the beginning of this post was missing a trailing period, which would cost it some points when brought under the exacting animal eye. It has been corrected.

Nook (the music playing program)

I found out about this program that runs in the background and plays time- and season-appropriate Animal Crossing music. It’s free, there’s versions for Windows and Mac on the site, and I found a copy on the Arch depository so there’s obviously a version for Linux too. It even has a rain option.

Pretty simple today, but it’s free and fun and free. It’s freeee!

Nook ($0, Windows, Mac and Linux)

Nintendo to Shut Down 3DS and WiiU Online Play in April

It’s been making the rounds, but I feel it’s worth echoing. When the DS and Wii online servers shut down, it was forced because Nintendo’s partner who maintained the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection Servers decided they didn’t want to do that any more. This is Nintendo’s own decision here.

Screenshot from Nintendo Observer

The big game affected here is the first Splatoon, which still has, for now, free online play with the purchase of the game. Also affected will be Mario Kart 7 and Animal Crossing New Leaf for 3DS.

There will be some who will shrug over this, saying Nintendo shouldn’t be expected to run these services indefinitely. Sometimes they will shrug quite loudly. I am not one of them. I think online servers should be kept going for much longer than most companies run them. I think this should be considered part of the contract they entered into when they sold the game. It is true that 3DS and WiiU games had free online server access, that Nintendo’s multiplayer subscription service began with the Switch. But I still think the way I do, and I also think it’s foolish to think that, just because it’s a paid service, that Switch servers will be kept running for any longer than the 3DS and WiiU servers were.

My concern is an issue of software preservation. These kinds of games and services are in danger of being outright lost in their current form, like many MMORPGs, and iOS and Android games for previous versions of those OSes. I feel very strongly that this software should be remembered and made available for future generations. It’s true that there are efforts to reverse engineer these kinds of services, but there is no guarantee that they will be completely accurate, or even successful at all, especially if they rely on secret algorithms and information housed on the official servers.

Ah well. Get in those free splatmatches while you can. Their days are numbered.

A Secret About the Text in Nintendo Games

Let me tell you something about Nintendo games. While I have no knowledge from inside the company, either the Japanese or American sides, what I’ve seen over the years makes me pretty confident in this knowledge. There is a good chance it applies to other companies too, but I’ve noticed it most often from Nintendo. I share it now with you.

First, can you tell what the messages in these images have in common?

They all contain item names, but what’s more, they’re all written in such a way that the item name (along with whatever introductory articles it requires) is on a line to itself.

Nintendo games are written in Japan, and then localized to other countries. Localization usually involves translating, sometimes adjusting, the text, and sometimes graphics, to other languages. This process usually involves a bare minimum of engine work; the coding is largely ready for release at this point. It’s not supposed to need changing the code itself much, for localization.

Japanese fonts are mostly monospaced. Hiragana, katakana and kanji, the three kinds of Japanese characters, are depicted in them all with glyphs of the same size. I’m not sure this is why, but I think there’s a good chance it’s the reason, that text boxes in Nintendo games tend to not support that essential feature to all word processors made in the past three decades: word wrap. It’s not needed for Japanese generally, for the text will be written with newlines embedded. Most text isn’t dynamic, so it usually isn’t a problem.

Once in a great while, due to a localization error, this becomes evident. I remember seeing once a text line in Ocarina of Time, in a dialogue in Kakariko Village, where the text extended outside of the message window. It’s a bit surprising when it happens because usually Nintendo is good about catching it.

However, there is a weird implication of the need to keep all the words properly bordered within their message boxes: if a string has a dynamic part at all, a place where the text can vary, then the text around it must be written to account for the widest text that can possibly be put there.

This is generally true for most games I’ve seen, but where I notice it most frequently is in Animal Crossing games, which have a lot of dynamic text, and must account for the widest possible player, villager and, especially, item names, some of which are pretty long.

It is for this reason that, if a dialogue in an Animal Crossing game contains the name of an item, the other text on that line must be kept pretty short, to prevent the text from overflowing the bounds of the message box. Which is a pretty onerous localization requirement, when you think of it. As a result, the majority of dialogue texts in the game are written in such a way that the item name comes at the end of a sentence, so the inevitable following line break looks natural. This means a lot of characters in shop dialogue begin with an interjection of the item name followed by an exclamation point, so it won’t be so obvious that there’s going to be a lot of white space after the item.

Here are a few more examples from New Horizons:

Make Random Items Appear Where You Want In Animal Crossing New Horizons

It’s three years after the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, famously introduced to a human contact-starved world right when efforts to contain Pandemic 2020 were at their height, unlike now when the world has largely decided to let the immuno-compromised fend for themselves. This isn’t the place to say what I think about that, but it is the place to write something that, had it been known in 2020, might have helped people out a lot.

The following is paraphrased from my Mastodon thread on the matter.

Every day, the game hides up to 10 100-bell coins, 5 wasps nests, and 2 random furniture items in trees on your island.

If you care about finding any of these things, there is a way to make the game put them where you want them. Selling wasps and items made from nests can bring in about 10,000 bells a day. The furniture can be given to villagers to help increase friendship. The coins aren’t worth much, admittedly.

Doing this, you can easily get the items you want each day without searching among all your trees. I use it to get the two random furniture pieces each day.

To make this trick work, you must have _exactly 17 non-fruit trees on your island_, enough to generate all the randomly-placed tree items. They can be cedar or other, plain trees.

If you don’t discover one of these items on a day, it’ll be left there for following days. It only places new items if the old ones haven’t been discovered, up to the maximum of each type. The trick relies on this fact.

Decide which of the categories of items you want to lock down the location of. Starting from that location, shake each tree until you find one of the objects you care about. In the example images I use furniture (the leaf icons), since those are a type of item it’s useful to search for quickly. You’ll probably want to have a net on hand, and maybe some Medicine, in the likely event you find one or more wasps’ nests.

Once you found the kind of item you want, stop shaking trees for that day. On the next day, all of the items you discovered will be found among the trees you shook that day, just in different places. Now, shake only the tree you want the item to appear in. If it’s not the item, keep shaking the trees you had shaken before until you find it. With luck, you’ll find it before you shake them all. Now stop shaking trees again.

Doing this day after day, you can get the item narrowed down until it appears where you want it to be generated. Once it appears there, stop shaking for that day, and then don’t shake it again on following days. Start over with another of the type of item you want to narrow down.

By working like this, probably within a couple of weeks you can get all the items you want generating where you want them. So long as you don’t shake any other trees, those will always produce the ones you want. If you shake other random trees, you’ll introduce uncertainty into what’s generated.

In this way, I have produced two trees that always produce furniture every day, generally without fail. This trick has been tested for months on my island.

The only drawback that I can find is, a couple of seasonal events (Christmas and Easter) are known to disrupt it, since they can repurpose some of your trees as non-random types for a little while. When the event ends, you’ll probably have to set it up again.

Animal Crossing New Horizons (Lack Of Recent) Updates

This is a bit of an expansion over a couple of Mastodon posts I made yesterday. (On what account? Here!)

Animal Crossing New Horizons was an amazing hit for Nintendo. It hit right at the start of the pandemic, and so quickly became the second best-selling game on the system.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? 27 million copies. Super Mario Odyssey? 23 million copies. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate? 29 million copies. These are all very high sales figures. Nintendo has made bank during the Switch era.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons? 40 million units sold. That’s over 2.4 billion dollars in gross revenue, and not even counting Nintendo Online subscriptions and the paid DLC! The only Switch game to surpass it has been Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which has sold 47 million units.

You’d think a game like that would have a long support life, but you’d be wrong. Three years in and it’s been over a year since the last meaningful update. Nintendo has largely abandoned the audience of the most popular Animal Crossing game ever made, by a huge margin.

Why is this so strange? Most games don’t update after a couple of years, after all. There are games that have made a go of a long-lived, if no perpetual, update cycle. Team Fortress 2 famously went on for like a decade of frequent updates, and while Valve has cooled on it since it still sees a lot of play. Stardew Valley is still updated from time to time, and it’s an indie game, although one with a very low overhead.

Animal Crossing, however, has, from the beginning, been a form of gaming that almost demands to be played for a significant period of time. People have played the Gamecube version for many years, keeping their island alive through decades of real time.

Before consoles could connect to the internet, of course, they couldn’t even be updated. But with the introduction of the internet a lot of options became available. The possibilities for a game-as-service approach to Animal Crossing have been great and, in large part, unexplored.

Image from Animal Crossing Wiki
Image from Nookipedia

The thing that really made this all visible is the New Year’s Arch item. The first year the game was released, they made available an archway, made of balloons, with the number 2021 set at the top of it. Then for 2022 they made another version of it, but notably, it didn’t involve hardly any new geometry; it was just the 2021 arch with different colors, and a 2 in place of the 1. It looked almost a if it had been auto-generated, like maybe the game itself had support to make arches programmatically. The item’s catalog description, which was identical for both arches, is even careful not to mention the year on the model: “An arch bearing the Gregorian calendar’s number for the new year.” Why be so elliptical about it if it wasn’t intended to be reused many times?

Behold them in their generic splendor

But no, that wasn’t the case. 2023 saw no new arch at all. The first two arches now stand out in the inventory as a stark reminder of that brief window of time when New Horizons saw active support. Ten years from now, people who come back to the game, or (heaven help them/us) never left it will still see only those two arches, mementos of the time when the game was new. It’s not like a new arch would be a huge addition: there’s obviously already a content pipeline that can be used to add new items fairly easily, and a 2023 arch made along the lines of the 2022 one would probably be about five minutes of work.

No one expects Nintendo to add new features indefinitely, or always for free, but the lack of a new arch, the lowest-effort update imaginable, makes it clear that absolutely no additions will be coming to the game, probably ever, not even extremely minor things like updated yearly items. ACNH updates were something that Nintendo could have comfortably milked for years. It’s not like we aren’t already paying them for online server access.

Animal Crossing is not like other games, but Nintendo doesn’t seem to realize that, has never really understood what the series is about. The archway is just another example. And it doesn’t make a fan of series want to buy any new versions if they know they’re going to be supported only for a brief period of the game’s lifetime.