I just finished a long bout of Animal Crossing: City Folk with Jon’s sister-in-law, who recently got the game. I was quite tickled to see that her town’s native fruit is oranges, whereas mine is cherries, so we were able to trade and now I have another fruit that’ll get me 500 Bells apiece instead of the native fruit’s 100 Bells. She also had a golden shovel which I was shocked at because I didn’t know how you get them, so I figured it was like the silver can where you have to spend time buying flower seeds before Nook’ll hand one over. She told me how to get one and I should have one by tomorrow morning. :)

I never look up secrets to Animal Crossing because I get more enjoyment out of finding things out “honestly”: animals telling me, stumbling across it myself, or one of the other players in-game. Jon recently created a character in my town and he’s all about reading guides online to find out how to make the most Bells, get the rarest items, etc. Somehow, I don’t have a problem with time traveling in the game, though I only do small jumps, like when I’ve missed Nook’s shop being open or one of the visitors (K.K. Slider and Joan, I’m lookin’ at you) has left before I got a chance to interact with them. Part of the fun of the game for me is the anticipation of a special event, so I don’t like to just jump ahead or behind in time to get there. I’m also trying to crossbreed flowers and I’ve read time traveling can mess up your hybrids.

I agree with Jem’s comment a while back about this A.C. layout needing some of the animals from the game. I might try to take some screenshots of them and then crack out Photoshop to snip them out such that they have a transparent background. My technique for that has been pretty simple:

1. Make a copy of the layer with the object you want to cut out.
2. Use Photoshop’s Extract filter to make a rough cut of the object (e.g. tree, myself, seashell). It helps to use my small Wacom tablet rather than trying to do it all via my Macbook’s touchpad.
3. When I have the object cut out, I use the Magic Wand tool to select the transparent background–everything but the object I want.
4. I go to the original layer, the one without the object cut out of the background, and use Select > Modify > Smooth with a Sample Radius of 3 to smooth out the rough selection. Then, I delete that smoothed-out background so that I have the cut-out object again, but this time with a smoother edge. Go ahead and hide or delete the first rough cut-out of the object.

I found this works best on things like trees and seashells, but not so much on my own little character since I ended up having little tufts of greenery behind her that didn’t fit.