On Friday I talked about the process of summoning an Amiibo Figure or an Amiibo Card to your Island. Over the years Nintendo has released a large number of limited edition Amiibo products associated with Animal Crossing. The products compatible with New Horizons are numerous but as far as I can tell you have the following to choose from.
Animal Crossing Amiibo Series – Cannot be invited to Campground
Villager SSB Amiibo – Cannot be invited to Campground
Isabelle SSB Amiibo – Cannot be invited to Campground
Animal Crossing Amiibo Cards (4 series of 100 cards) – Most animals can be invited with some exceptions
Animal Crossing Welcome Amiibo Cards (50 Cards) – I believe all can be invited to Campground.
Animal Crossing Welcome Sanrio Amiibo Cards (6 cards) – None of these are compatible
So for the purpose of inviting Villagers you have 450 cards and of those a number are characters like Isabelle, Tom Nook and the Nooklings that are not available for inviting to the Campground. The general animals like the ones shown above however can be. Side note… there is overlap between the Welcome and the 400 card series so for the sake of our purposes I am generally going to focus on the four series of cards that came out in 2015-2016 and are now exceptionally hard to find except for on the after market.
The problem with Nintendo and Amiibo products is there is a built in rarity to them. Generally speaking they have only one print run and when that is sold out they are gone other than purchasing from collectors or folks looking to flip product. Were they simply a collectible this would be perfectly fine, but the problem I personally have with them is that they also serve interesting in game functionality with specific titles. The challenge is that a lot of these cards are rather pricey in third party markets like Ebay. For example here are some prices for Cherry the dog, one of the Amiibos that I wanted to invite to my island. The prices vary wildly for authentic cards, and even more if you are hunting for a card that has never been scanned or associated with a system already. So if you were to say you could pick up the cards for an average price of $20 per animal… and say there are only 350 usable animals in the 400 card set. It would be rather expensive to pick up a full series run if that was what you are after.
If you were wanting to pick up the original packs of cards from the various 4 release series, they seem to be going for around $20 for each pack of 6 cards. As a result of these prices you will see replica cards available on grey markets like Etsy that look and function exactly like the real thing. They still are not exceptionally cheap and if you want to pick up a full series run you are still likely going to be paying a minimum of $2 per card with the cheapest I have seen a full set being around $600. For some reason Etsy seems to think I want prices in Euros, but you can do the conversion math yourself. At this point you might be asking yourself… how exactly can they replicate an amiibo card and get it to work perfectly with Nintendo games? Now we get into the meat of why I am posting today.
Amiibos operate on a technology called NFC or Near Field Communication. This operates in two varieties.. active NFC like that of your smart phone or passive NFC like that of a tap to pay credit card. Amiibos operate on the later of these two and as such require no power and also never stop working because they are relying on the reader device to supply an electromagnetic current which causes the device to spring to life and respond. This is also why when you hold an Amiibo to scan it, it takes a second or two before it gets a read. Amiibos more specifically work on a format known as NTAG215 which is an open standard, and as a result you can effectively take ANY NTAG215 compliant NFC card and write an Amiibo’s image to it. The above is a picture of some various form factors available on AliExpress the most common being the “Proximity Card” similar to your Employee ID card that lets you into buildings, and the sticker which can be adhered to anything giving you NFC functionality. Generally speaking it is around $15 for 50 NFC Proximity Cards and the price goes down significantly as you buy in bulk.
There is a piece of software called TagMo available on Android phones that allows you to use the built in NFC functionality of your device and use it to scan Amiibos, save off the information from them, and then write all of that information to a new blank NFC NTAG215 card or sticker. I took a few screenshots of the app after launching, the app searching for a tag to load and then the app with Al’s card image loaded in. From there I could very easily take a blank card and write Al’s data to it, effectively creating my own Amiibo Card that works as any other Amiibo Card in Animal Crossing New Horizons. Effectively this is what all of those sellers on Ebay or Etsy do to create their “replica” cards. In fact the Legend of Zelda series of Amiibos were so popular that Chinese factories were churning out really professional looking mini-cards that allowed you to carry the entire series run of figures in a form factor roughly as large as a pack of chewing gum. If Animal Crossing New Horizon maintains its popularity, I figure in the future something like that will probably be available here as well.
In the meantime however I have crafted a few cards for the Villagers I am interested in inviting. There are archives online that have dumps of the data from the Amiibo cards. TagMo is readily available through the GitHub archive, but in order to get it to work you need a few bits of data in order to successfully write the cards. There is a reddit thread out there with information on how to get that set up, and where to find the important bits of data. All of these things combined and an Android 5.0 or higher device with NFC functionality… and you can write your own Amiibo Cards. Generally speaking the NFC cards can be written to once and then are effectively read only after that point. However there are a few third party devices out there like the Amiiqo which serve as an NFC tag emulator, allowing you to swap between Amiibo Images on the fly. These however generally run around $100 for the Amiiqo itself and the reader capable of writing data to it.
Of course none of this would be needed if there were not the built in scarcity of Amiibo products. If you could reasonably go purchase a brand new Amiibo at the normal $10-15 price you can find them for new in the store or on online retailers, it is unlikely that faking amiibos would have become quite so rampant. Once a series run is no longer available on the open market, you are effectively forced to pay collectors prices for them. I personally don’t care about the collectibility aspect, I just want the in game functionality. Essentially in the games that support them, Amiibos are like having DLC that only a handful of people can realistically acquire. So for the time being I will continue to fake out Amiibos, and now you have all of the knowledge needed to do it as well. Unfortunately iPhone users, to the best of my knowledge there is no equivalent of TagMo since iOS only allows reading tags not writing them.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
