How to Hunt for Villagers for Free in Animal Crossing New Horizons - ACNH Villager Hunting Tips

8/25/2020 2:55:21 PM

In Animal Crossing New Horizons, players can use a Nook Mile Ticket to visit a mystery island to find a random villager. How you can hunt for villagers without Nook Miles Tickets? The free ACNH villager hunting method is using the campsite. 

animal crossing villager hunting


How Does Campsite Work in ACNH?

The campsite in ACNH is a building that allows villagers to visit the player’s island. It gives visitors a place to stay when they come to your island. You can unlock the campsite after the Resident Services building is upgraded. In order to upgrade the Resident Service, you have to build 3 houses and get 3 new villagers to move into your island, which is separate from the first two villagers that arrive at the island with you. 


The campsite is a great place to recruit more residents to live on your island once it's built, the villager who comes to your island when you first create a campsite is fixed, you can’t change it, so if you want to get a specific villager, you can only try from the second villager. There will be a period lack of further visitors after the first resident has visited, the next visitor will show up at the earliest being three days after your last villager visited the campsite. What you should know is that the chance of getting a new villager at the campsite within the first two days after the last villager has left is 0, that is 5% after 3 days, 10% after 4 days, 15% after 5 days and 20% after 6 days (the highest chance). Make sure you wait for at least six days to maximize your chances of having a visitor at the campsite. 


How to Hunt for Villagers for Free in Animal Crossing New Horizons

The biggest benefit for the campsite method is you don’t have to cost any ACNH NMT or Bells, another one is you won’t see the same villagers two times, you have a better chance of seeing potential villagers that you've never seen before. But it will take you much more time for seeing one villager at a campsite than being able to use one NMT and seeing a villager at a mysterious island.


Here's the most efficient way to do the campsite method for time travelers, first you should begin by traveling 6 days forward from the last time you played, next load up the game until you see Isabelle's morning announcements, if Isabella doesn't mention a visitor at the campsite, exit your house and save the game. Then press your home button and go to the main menu and go to your date and time location to travel one day forward, open your game again to check if there is an announcement from Isabella, if not, repeat the process until it’s available. A tip is if Isabel doesn't mention that you have a campsite visitor as your first announcement then this tells you that you do not have a visitor and you do not need to watch the rest of area announcements. Once you finally have a visitor, go see who it is, if it's not a villager you're looking for then exit the game and skip 6 days forward, repeat this entire process until you get the next villager, keep doing this until you get a villager you want to keep. Once you ask the villager to move in, it'll prompt you to either buy land if you have less than 10 villagers or they will randomly move out one of your villagers if you have 10 villagers, because  the maximum number of villagers that can live on your island is 10. If you happen to reach this limit, the villager that visits your campsite will offer to swap places with an existing character on your island,  this character is chosen randomly, but a good tip to remain the residents you like is that once the campsite villager decides who will be swapped, you can prevent this by shutting down the game before the dialog between you to finish the game auto-saves at the end of conversations, so if you press the home button and shut down the game, you'll be able to repeat this process until a villager can be replaced is selected.


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