What did I learn from two weeks playing Animal Crossing New Horizon
Weather is warming up in Texas, and I totally missed the wildflowers since I have been staying home for more than 6 weeks now. Like many of you, I picked up a Nintendo Switch and started to play Animal Crossing New Horizon because of the pandemic. Before this, there was no game in my daily routine, and I wouldn't call myself a gamer. Animal Crossing is an incremental RPG game, and it mimics real-life events. The game sets your stage on an island and provides you endless possibilities on building a town on that island. After two weeks of playing, I have unlocked the terraforming feature, which means I can now modify the landscape, the river, etc. on my island. I thought this would be an excellent time to take a break and look back to see what I would have done differently if I was going to restart the game. There are certain things I wished I could do in another way if I knew how the game runs.
Ramps and Bridges
When you are new to the game, you unlock features, and one day, you get to build bridges and ramps. I have done a few in the last weeks, and some of them have become an issue now I have the terraforming ability. Sure, it is convenient not to have to switch tools to jump over the river or to climb up a cliff, but they limit how you can reshape your island unless you demolished them. Each infrastructure piece cost about 100K bells, and I wouldn't want to waste my investment since I don't have extra bells to spend without hacking the game. The bridges and the ramps lock your landscape in place, without removing them, you can't change the placement of your river; instead, you have to accommodate them. Unless you know precisely how you would want to modify the landscape, I would wait till you unlock Terraforming, structure the landscape the way you want, and then build the ramps and the bridges.
Houses
The mistake I made about houses was, I place the properties too close to the river, or the edges of the cliffs. At some point in the game, you would have the ability to build fences. To add fences around the houses, you need extra space. In some situations, I wouldn't be able to add fences because the house was too close to the river, and I couldn't move the river because the river was locked down by the bridge placements. In addition to that, you are supposed to put down outdoor furniture to increase the appeal of your island. Without additional space, you can't do much. To increase the star rating of your island, you would need to decorate your island with all the items you found or purchased. Compared to outdoors, it seems to be less important to decorate the inside of your house. I have an extra 3 rooms for my house, but I only decorated one bedroom. The empty rooms don't seem to border Isabelle, the character that rate your island.
Making a million
Currency in the game is called bells. From what I learned, professional gamers are making millions with "time-traveling" hack, and sell them on eBay. Without hacking the game, it's going to be slower for you to make millions, but that shouldn't affect how you enjoy your game. The truth is, it is not that hard to make a million bells, but with all the expenses, you are giving most of the bells back to get things you want in the game.
One of the most popular ways to make bells is by selling turnips. You bought it on Sunday, and you have a week to sell them when the price is right. After buying and selling turnips for two weeks, I have concluded that, unless the price is lower than 50 bells, I won't buy much of them. Last two weeks, the turnip price on my island had never gone beyond 200 bells, not like what you see online, where they have priced over 500 bells on some people's islands. It's challenging to make a profit unless you spend a lot of time trying to travel to other people's islands where the price is high.
To me, the easiest way to make bells is to plant fruit trees everywhere, particularly non-native fruits. At some point, Isabelle is going to complain about having too many trees, but at the beginning, it really helped me get the bells I needed.
Another easy way of making bells is selling "Hot Items." Every day, you check with the guys at Nook Cranny, and they will tell you what's the "Hot Item" of the day. Some of the hot items require you to make them with woods, which you probably have gathered plenty of them from the beginning.
Lastly, certain butterflies that have a higher value tend to like flowers in blue, purple, and black. If you are lucky to travel to mystery islands that have those flowers, dig them up and bring them back. Plant those flowers together, and you will see butterflies show up very soon!
Saving your miles
Throughout playing the game, you earn miles that could be exchanged for tickets, items, or features. Although you do need those miles to get tickets to travel to mystery islands or things to decorate your islands, I do recommend you to save up some miles after 10 days in playing the game. If you played it normally like me, you would unlock Terraforming after two weeks. At that point, you would need miles in exchange for features for Terraforming, like different patterns for the pathways.
You can have endless ways to play the game, and I am sure most of you did better than me. So far, these are the things that I learned from my humble experience, and I hope these help some of you who are new to the game or thinking about start playing. If you liked me to visit your island, please drop a message down here, and I am more than happy to hop over to your island!
