Getting Amiibo Neighbors

Good morning everyone and welcome to another lovely day in Pandemia. This time I am actually talking about my Animal Crossing island and not the world of chaos surrounding us. I’ve talked about this being my first Animal Crossing game before, but also that in truth I played a bit of Pocket Camp. During my brief time playing that I did manage to bond with a few of the Campers, one specifically was Cherry the Goth Death Metal Dog. So when I found out that you could summon specific Villagers and get them to move in via Amiibo Cards, I had a goal. I always do a certain amount of nonsense to finish my goals but this one was considerably more than normal. The whole process of faking out an Amiibo Card is something I might get into in a later post, but for now I am going to focus on the actual process of getting someone you summon to move in because like many things in this game it is clear as mud.

The entire process becomes available when you build the campsite on your Island. You unlock the ability to build a campsite shortly after you have upgraded Resident Services from a tent to a proper building the comes complete with a nifty brickwork town square. If I am correct the sequence of events to get to this point looks a little something like this:

  • Pay off your first loan and upgrade tent to a house
  • Invite three new villagers to your island via island adventures
  • Build Nook’s Cranny Store
  • Place a Bridge
  • Designate land and craft random nonsense for the three villagers
  • Wait for them all to move in
  • Upgrade Resident Services

So much of the things that happen in this game happen on a very strict schedule and I am sure someone out there has a flowchart of all of it. After you get your campsite however you need to wait a full day, and then the next day a random camper will show up. You need to recruit this first random camper to your Island and wait for them to move in and clear out the campgrounds. Upon returning to Resident services you will get the ability through the ATM machine to summon an Amiibo to your campsite.

So the rules appear to be that you can use an Amiibo or an Amiibo Card, of which there are 400 of them release in 4 different 100 card series. The prices on cards vary wildly and you can pick up a Cherry card on Ebay for everything between $15 to $50 depending on the seller. Sealed packs of cards are now going for around $20 each because we are in the crush of the release of a popular Animal Crossing game. I “acquired” Cherry and was ready to begin the process. I scanned the card in and got a screen that looks a little like this where you invite her to your campsite.

Almost immediately she shows up in the campsite and you can begin the process of interacting with whomever you scanned. You have to talk to them a few times before they give you a dialog that asks you to craft a souvenir for them. If it is something that you don’t have the pattern for they will supply that as well. I thought to myself that surely once I handed off the item I would get a prompt to invite them, and for the most part that is the sequence of events that played out. However after the first time inviting them they said that they weren’t quite sure and would like me to invite them back some other time.

This process played out three more times. The next morning I would summon Cherry to the island first thing and after a throw away dialog she would give me one asking for an item. I would go off and craft said item and once again on the second day I got the “invite me back again” prompt. However finally on the third day I got one where I managed to convince them to move to the island. They state that they will go talk to resident services, but immediately returns telling you that Tom Nook says the island is full. So here is where I did things in the wrong order for a bit. I thought okay… I will go make a new campsite which costs 10,000 bells and then when I invite her back the next day she will move in. However the next morning I wake to find a random islander had purchased my fresh new spot.

So once again I summoned forth Amiibo Card Cherry and after doing some research and following down a handful of Reddit and YouTube Rabbit trails, I found the error in my sequencing. Upon inviting your Amiibo and getting the dialog about the Island being full, you need to go ahead and make a new plot of land like I was originally thinking. However the thing I did wrong is you then need to go right back to your Amiibo and talk to them again. They will talk to Resident Services and this time around Tom Nook will tell them that they can move in immediately. The very next day you should see your Amiibo moving in and you have successfully jumped through all of the stupid hoops it takes to recruit someone.

So to summarize the sequence of events in list form:

  • Build Campsite
  • Recruit First Random Camper
  • Get the ability to Summon Amiibos to Campsite
  • Summon Amiibo – Day One
    • Craft Random Souvenir
    • Get Shot Down
  • Summon Amiibo – Day Two
    • Craft Random Souvenir
    • Get Shot Down Again
  • Summon Amiibo – Day Three
    • Craft Random Souvenir
    • Get Move In/Island Full Dialog
  • Pay Tom Nook 10,000 Bells to Make a New Plot
  • Talk to Amiibo Again and get successful Move In Dialog

Why yes I do have a yellow diner seat on my beach… thanks for noticing. The other interesting thing that I have learned through this entire nonsense process is that you can use this trick of summoning campers to kick Villagers off your island once you have reached the point of being full. Apparently the entire process follows as normal, but when you have finally convinced the person and get the move in dialog, it asks you if you have heard of anyone who wants to leave the island. You then get a prompt to choose one of your Islanders that you want to swap for the newcomer. Upon doing this the Amiibo goes off and talks to this Islander and the next day they begin moving out and a few days later your new Amiibo arrives. This is in part why I am considering talking through the nonsense process of acquiring Amiibo cards through other means, so that you too can punt annoying islanders. However that is a discussion for another day.

One last thing… I have a sign up sheet for an Animal Crossing Info exchange. If you sign up, I will end up dumping the relevant information into another google sheet and then sharing it back with you. The idea being that it tracks pertinent information like type of fruit, flowers and what stores you have access to. Feel free to add your info.

Flower and Tree Placement

Good morning folks! Another fine day here in Pandemia, where I have created a welcome sign at the docks for everyone who might visit. Yesterday was the day when I actually started trying to give a shit about how things looked and quickly realized that I have way the hell too many trees on the island. One of the things that I wish I could do is flip into a grid system in the outside world like I can in housing because trying to control with any semblance of precision where I am facing with an analog joystick is most definitely a challenge.

One of the things that I spent part of yesterday morning researching was how to best place tress to make sure that they would grow. I’ve accidentally placed a few of the fruit I collected from island hopping and my fruit exchange party in too close of quarters. Apparently trees like a little bit of social distancing and as a result I documented some of my research in pictogram form. Essentailly based on what I could tell a tree needs a ring of eight empty squares around it, which makes sense because the same thing is true with trying to maximize the yield from banging on a rock. That means that if I wanted to be absolutely efficient I would set up a grid pattern like shown above and spend time moving all of my trees into that arrangement.

[UPDATE] – Based on Stephen’s comment it seems as though the trees need a ring of 8 empty squares but can apparently square an empty square with another tree, so in theory that means you can compact things down even tighter to something like this grid above. Again I really wish that I could flip into grid mode like you can with a house to allow for more precise placement, but as I start moving my trees around I will experiment with packing them in tighter and then potentially can leave only things like my money trees out in the open with everything else in the orchard.

The other thing that I spent time researching was flower arrangement and hybridization. There is a twitter user @GracieSwitch that has a ton of really good guides in thread form. Unfortunately between yesterday and today the user has locked down their account and as such they are not readily available. I am guessing either someone started using the guides without credit or was a jerk to the user. [EDIT] – turns out it was just an overwhelming amount of social media interaction. As such I have attempted to recreate the concepts from memory and if I manage to bungle something please forgive me. The basic layout for flowers is a grid pattern where you are skipping every other square. As I understand it on a given day a new flower can spawn in any one of the open squares if you have watered the flowers during the previous day.

When the flower is in between two different colors a hybrid flower can spawn with a new color. Essentially as I understand it you have three options for a new flower where it could spawn with either of the original colors or if you are lucky you might get a new color. Polygon has a guide outlining which colors can be produced from which species of flowers so I suggest you go over there and read that if you are wanting something specific. Since I have no clue what I am doing and am mostly just working with Tulips I planted the majority of my flowers in grid pattern.

Now here is where I am hoping my memory holds up, because @GracieSwitch outlined another method that is supposedly more predictable in the results of your flower generation. The idea being that you have two flowers side by side and then the maximum possible empty space around them without overlapping allowing for lots of possible area for flower generation. Of course however you can see that you need a lot more empty space but I also set up an area near my house that has some of this going on so we will see if any of these schemes worked. Once you have a flower generator set up the way that you want, the idea is that each day you harvest any new flower spawns and water your flower bed in preparation for the next possible day of spawning.

[ANOTHER UPDATE] – Turns out the I need to credit @TwillitPrince for the flower placement pattern that was in the @GracieSwitch thread I referenced.

I feel like I need to give the very important disclaimer that once again… Animal Crossing New Horizon is my first Animal Crossing game. I am figuring all of this out for the first time and am standing on the backs of all of the AC players that came before me. I am just sharing whatever I happen across in case someone else is needing to figure these things out as well. However if anything I post is incorrect please by all means comment below and correct me. I am always open to thoughtful criticism. I mean I don’t love the folks who pedantically point out some spelling or grammatical error, but I am always down with someone correcting me on factual bits.

Shake that Tambourine

You know I probably should be talking more about Blapril today, but there is an entire post on that already. Instead I am going to talk some more about Animal Crossing New Horizon which is apparently my new main game. I still find this all bizarre given that I had never really played one of this games and wasn’t even sure if I would be that into it. Now I would say that much like Breath of the Wild, this is a game that is worth plunking down the entire price of a console just to play it. From what I am hearing this also may be responsible for console shortages because apparently it is extremely hard to find a non-mini style switch that docks and plays on a television. I still think that the mini would have been the perfect device had they just included the video output chipset to allow it to be docked.

I’ve visited so many islands and they are all adorable. Mine is decidedly not. My room decor is what I would like to call “swap meet chic”, where I basically cram everything I come across into the same room without it actually making any semblance of sense. Sure I have a random candle on the wall because it came from a balloon. I also have an inexplicable cat tower but no cat… so whatever… it allows me to go over and bat the ball if I try and interact with it. Why do I have two wardrobes? Because I built one and then built another one for a quest because I forgot I had built the first one… don’t judge me.

I spend my days harvesting resources and stockpiling them… which then I turn into stone axes… which break… so I make more of them. Were this on the PC I would have long downloaded a way to cheat durability so nothing ever broke. However I guess it does give me a reason for all of my harvesting… even though it seems like only one type of wood regularly gets used for anything that I actually need. I have so much hard wood folks… and I am not even trying to make a joke about that. I figure at some point when I unlock terraforming I will actually start caring about the placement of things, but I am super jealous of all of the folks that I go visit that seem to have a “plan” or even “goals”. For now I mostly just have a random assemblage of shit I drug home from the dump.

For example, this is the island of @playerVShobbies and it is absolutely adorable. I am super jealous of her Gnome collection and really do need to spend more of my days hopping around and shopping from different nook stores. I popped over her to sell all of the apples that I had been hoarding for a whopping 35,000 bells. We talked on twitter while she sat on this rock and did the joyful emote over and over, and I did it back as a thank you for opening up the island and giving me a place to sell my fruit.

Her island also had this super sweet gas pump, which I bought for some reason… and is now just sorta sitting in my front yard because reasons. Anything that speaks to me I am dragging home in part because I know what is being sold is completely random on a given day and that I might only ever see it the one time. I learned that lesson from the small amount of time that I played Pocket Camp. I love old gas pumps in real life even though I am not in the least a “car guy” so I guess it makes sense that I would want to try and drag one home from my travels. The thing that I really need to find at some point is bamboo, which I guess means more island adventures… which in turn means more damned tools breaking.

The highlight of the night however has to be going over to South Perry and visiting @Kuriie. She gave me a super sweet Tambourine which is fun to bang on and I have been doing this pretty much from that point forward. It makes me just ridiculously happy to do this, and while I am certain that the novelty will wear off at some point it is pure enjoyment for the time being. Now I am starting to think that maybe I should not have named my island Pandemia… though I guess I could do a sweet logo like this for my docks. Kuriie’s island was super good and once again… here is a person with a major plan and a lot of talent. Everything was laid out purposefully and I guess made me realize that I need to probably sort out exactly what I want to do and how.

My happy place on the island however is the Museum and more specifically the deep water area. It is so peaceful to watch the schools of sardines swirling around. Getting this building opened up has singlehandedly done more or my desire to fish than anything else in the game. I want to catch more fish to make the aquarium even cooler. Like I am sure the dinosaur exhibit will be sweet once I have completed a few of them… but for now this is my moment of zen. I named my island Pandemia in part because I am using this game as a way of combating all of the frustration surrounding the very real Pandemic we find ourselves dealing with. Games have always been an escape for me, but I am not sure if I have ever needed a happy place to keep returning to quite in the same way as I have now with Animal Crossing. Thank you so much to Nintendo for releasing this during our time of need.

Animal Crossing Thoughts

Good morning everyone and welcome to another episode of Life in Pandemia. This time around I don’t only mean living in the time of pandemic but also because I named my Island in Animal Crossing New Horizons Pandemia. I mean this is the game that is going to get me through this crisis sane so it seemed fitting. First off you have to understand that I have never played an Animal Crossing game before. Well I have played Pocket Camp but I am rapidly learning that as far as games go it doesn’t necessarily count towards having played an Animal Crossing game. It did however introduce me to several of the characters and for that I am thankful, because I fully anticipated the Nook company shenanigans.

What I did not expect was to be quite so attached to my island home this early into the process. For the uninitiated in Animal Crossing New Horizon you are given the choice of four islands when you first start up the game. You should note that you will only ever be able to have a single island on that Switch device without I believe uninstalling the game and reinstalling it but don’t quote me on that process. I went with a design that has a little island in the center of the map with the ultimate goal of eventually relocating my home there. However that said I am kinda digging my little fenced off peninsula at the moment so I might just stay where I am. I know later in the game I can do some terraforming to make things a little more manageable.

Another thing that I did not expect was how much of a multiplayer experience this game would end up being. On Saturday I opened up my Island and posted on twitter that I had apples for free near the dock. I then proceeded to go afk for awhile and fix lunch, only to find that my island had become an unattended fruit exchange station while I was gone and throughout the course of the entire time I had it open I had somewhere around fifteen friends pop by to visit. There was a time period where as soon as one person had arrived I was getting a notice saying that another person was on their way. The end result was that I essentially had one of every fruit brought to me and I completed that achievement without actually putting any effort in.

Another charming as hell thing that happened is a bunch of people left messages on my board. I particularly think Stargrace’s Quail Life is adorable. I need to visit more islands and leave more messages. I left them all a version of the AggroChat intro on the board before I opened it up thinking that someone out there might get the reference. Ultimately I expected Animal Crossing to be a fairly solitary game where I am spending more time interacting with NPCs than I with other players, but if you open your island… folks seem to just show up. I think maybe it was helped by the fact that we were all hitting Day Two and having the Airport open for use about the same time and I just caught a wave of folks wanting to try out hopping to a friends island.

Having never played an Animal Crossing game before I was not exactly sure what the flow of gameplay would be. It seems each day you are presented with one or two new things that need accomplished and if you can somehow keep up with the demand you can keep progressing your island to a higher state. So for example I say that on Day Two the Airport opens, but I am not entirely certain if that is the case were I not to have done something that I did on Day One. I know you don’t get Blathers on Day Two if you did not manage to show Tom Nook five new creatures on Day One. I am sure somewhere in Reddit there is a complicated flow chart that shows what it takes to get everything. However I know that the earliest you can get the vaulting pole and shovel is day two and the earliest you can build a bridge and get your ladder is on day three for example.

We also happen to be in the middle of another Internet Zeitgeist as everyone seems to be playing the same game. When I took this screenshot I had 32 friends online and playing games and they were ALL playing Animal Crossing New Horizon. I was not exactly sure how I would like this game having never played one before, but on some level I feel like I have been missing out since the N64 era. Whatever it is about this game be it the cute animal friends or the low stress collection activities, but there is something calming about it. This is the game we need right now given the situation that we are all having to deal with. So sure I named my island Pandemia, but for now at least this game is providing a much needed respite from the world as a whole.

As you can tell by this image that I have discovered the pro creation suite within Animal Crossing. The cap, shirt, face paint, floor and wallpaper are all things that I created and honestly I have been spending as much time doing that as I have doing other things in game. The shirt was a must and it is patterned off of the one that Mae wears in Night in the Woods. The make up… no clue what I was going for there but I have changed it a few times so far. The flooring was inspired by the carpet in The Shining and I honestly went with something more simplified when I realized how hard it would be to translate the actual carpet design to pixels. I’ve changed the wallpaper a bunch of times and for now I am pretty happen with this simple pattern. Now however it is beginning remind me a little bit more of Wes Anderson than Stanley Kubrick.

I feel like I have been through a very rapid evolution of understanding when it comes to Animal Crossing. From the tweet above I legitimately was not ready for what I found myself experiencing. However there is something relaxing about knowing that without cheating and setting your system clock forward… there is only so much that you can do in a single day. When you have reached the end of what you want to do then you can sit down the game and go on to do other things. I appreciate this greatly given that so many games are vying for my attention. I’ve still had time to hang out and grind rifts in Diablo 3 or poke my head into the other game that came out on the 20th, Doom Eternal. Animal Crossing can be all consuming, or it can not be if you choose to take it slow and easy and I greatly appreciate that a game isn’t trying to consume every moment of my waking hours.

On updates that are actually from the real world, which is also Pandemia… I am now entering my second week of remote work. My team was a bit of a vanguard for the entire work force and as of today I believe all but 10 employees are going to be remote leaving only a skeletal crew behind that either didn’t want to work remotely or could not for some reason. The weekend was really freaking weird when it more or less meant being in the same place that I was in for the entire work week. I’ve stopped doing my routine of getting up every morning and going to the corner convenience store because that exposes me to way too many people in the process. Instead we got a bunch of donuts from our local donut shop yesterday and plan on rationing them throughout the week. So far we are doing fine and we have a grocery pick up scheduled for this evening which should give us more options for food and such.

I hope all of you out there are also doing okay. We will pull through this and hopefully at some point in the future we will get to return to normalcy. I do have to wonder what the world is going to look like on the other side of this. Metal detectors were the thing that spontaneously showed up in building designs after 911, and I am wondering if thermal imaging is going to be the hallmark of the pandemic so you can see when someone is running a fever. I remember one episode of the old television show Sliders where they landed on a timeline where everything was hyper aware of pathogens and food all came in hermetically sealed packaging. I hope we don’t end up going off the deep end but I do know there will be changes as a result of this, I just am struggling to predict them. Anyways have a wonderful week and I will see you again tomorrow.