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:
- Make a copy of the layer with the object you want to cut out.
- 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.
- When I have the object cut out, I use the Magic Wand tool to select the transparent background–everything but the object I want.
- 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.
AC Toolkit hack to fix grass
So while reading about Animal Crossing: City Folk earlier, I tried to find a way to restore some of my grass, which has been wearing away to brown dirt everywhere. Turns out there’s quite a stink over the “feature” Animal Tracks that Nintendo built into the game. The idea was that grass would wear away where you walked most, but the problem is that it wears away pretty quickly and can take a month to nearly a year to grow back fully. If you’ve never played Animal Crossing, this might not seem like a big deal to you, but it’s actually a big part of the game. A lot of Animal Crossing is aesthetic value, and living in Mudville is not attractive. Also, you miss out on certain bugs that live in grass and, in the winter, snow only appears on grass so you can’t do snowmen.
There are a couple of online petitions to try and get Nintendo to fix this or let players turn off Animal Tracks, but no luck so far. See Save Our Grass and Animal Tracks Petition. I read the most extreme accounts by some users about how they would time travel a day at a time for a month or more to regrow grass, or not walk off their paths at all, or hack their Wiis to alter their town and regrow grass. It’s really pretty crazy the lengths players have to go to in order to keep their grass, and it almost discourages you from using the game. Apparently, the more you load the game, the more you wear off the grass, so if you have several players logging on several times a day, you’ll see a lot of grass wear. I don’t want to be afraid to run around like crazy, chasing bugs and exploring every nook and cranny of my town, for fear of uglifying it. I also want to be able to invite visitors over and play games of hide and seek with the animals.
Tonight I decided to try the hack approach. I followed How to hack your grass back in Animal Crossing: City Folk, which worked wonderfully for me. Here are some notes about my experience that may help you, should you decide to try this: