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.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.