Guide: Choosing The Perfect Gift And Raising Friendship For Villagers In Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Guide: Choosing The Perfect Gift And Raising Friendship For Villagers In Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Animal Crossing: New Horizons features a massive cast of villagers that can potentially come to live on your island, all possessing quirky personalities and unique styles.

As with previous games, building up a good relationship with your villagers is a major part of New Horizons. Villagers that players have a strong friendship with will send the player letters, visit their house, as well as give them a framed personal photo.

In order to build friendship with their villagers, players need only to follow two basic steps: Talk to each villager at least once every day, as well as give them gifts.

That said, there are a few tips and tricks that players can follow in order to speed up the process, which we have compiled in the short guide below:

  • Friendship Points
    • Friendship in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is measured by points, each villager starts off with 25 points.
    • It is said that when friendship reaches zero, villagers will decide to move out, but this is not guaranteed.
  • Talk to villagers at least once a day
    • Note that talking to them too often may cause them to become annoyed and reduce friendship instead.
  • Send them letters
    • Letters with gifts attached are more effective.
  • Do favors for them
    • Favors include events such as “Lost Item” and “Fleas”.
    • Helping villagers resolve these troubles with increase friendship with them.
  • Gifts
    • After friendship has reached a certain level, players can give their villagers gifts.
    • Different gifts award different amounts of friendship points, according to the following:
      • Furniture – 3 points
      • Favorite clothing style – 2 points
      • Umbrellas (non-frog villagers only, they get 1 point) – 2 points
      • Flowers, fish, and insects – 2 points
      • Tools and music – 2 points
      • Wrapped gift – 1 point
      • Garbage – -2 points
    • The most effective gifts are furniture that costs at least 10,000 bells.
      • Note that gifted furniture may replace items in the villager’s home.
      • If 10,000 bells is too expensive, try to keep it above 1,000 bells.
    • Gifts that are wrapped with wrapping paper are more effective.
    • You can only gift villagers once per day.
  • Clothing
    • Each villager has a unique personal style preference for clothing, gifted clothes which match this style increase friendship a lot more.
      • Active – Sporty stuff like the sports cap, ski goggles, ladder shades, and wrestler uniform.
      • Colorful – Multicolored attire like the egg party dress, flashy cardigan, and pharaoh’s outfit.
      • Cool – Hip-themed clothing such as the collarless shirt, mage’s hat, and meme shirt.
      • Cute – Charming pieces like the heart shades, flower sweater, zen hair clip, and dolly shirt work wonders.
      • Elegant – Fancy-looking apparel such as the tiara, butterfly shades, and tailcoat.
      • Gorgeous – Beautiful things, for example the Labelle sunglasses, gown coat, and flashy hairpin.
      • Simple – Plain attire like the oval glasses, straw hat, and tee dress.
    • Nook Plaza has a tool that tells you which clothing is the “perfect gift” for each villager, and you can find this tool here.
  • Avoid Reducing Friendship
    • The following activities can potentially reduce friendship with villagers
      • Gifting Weeds or Garbage
      • Hitting them with the net
      • Pushing them around
    • Although it is rumored that reducing friendship with villagers can cause them to move out, this method has so far not been proven.

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