Every island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons can only contain a set number of villagers. There are hundreds of villagers total, but only a select few will end up on any given island. Villagers show up and move in regularly throughout the game, but players can also use Nook Miles Tickets to visit remote islands where other villagers can be found and invited to move in. Specific villager can also be added to the game with Amiibo cards, but those can be a bit hard to come by considering they were released alongside Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival.
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Because it can be difficult to find the villager you want, some New Horizons players have been using online marketplaces to buy and sell the popular villagers they come across. Payments are made with all different types of currencies, but the most popular payment types are bells and Nook Miles Tickets. One individual Nook Miles Ticket is worth several thousand bells, making them an easy way to make huge payments to other players. Still, that hasn’t stopped the most hardcore New Horizons players from spending real-world money to ensure they get their favorite villagers, as some of these transactions have moved to websites like eBay, where fan favorites like Raymond the cat sell for large sums of cash.
Some villagers are more common than others because they have Amiibo cards or other guaranteed ways to get them to show up, but the new villagers that make their debut in New Horizons are absolutely the hottest commodities on the market. These characters sell quickly at high prices because the chance of running into them in particular instead of the other hundreds of villagers in New Horizons is very slim. Raymond and Audie are just two examples of highly sought after New Horizons villagers. Thousands of Nook Miles Tickets are exchanged daily as players attempt to build their dream communities with all sorts of different villagers.
Some Animal Crossing players take their towns and islands very seriously, and the online villager trade is just another aspect of that. People with high turnip prices have already been opening up their island to strangers so long as they get a cut of the sale, and others have taken to forums and online marketplaces just to secure certain furniture crafting recipes. Some might say that practices like these undermine the point of Animal Crossing, and others might question the ethics of an online villager trade, but if a hardcore Animal Crossing fan wants something, they’ll find a way to get it.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is out now for Nintendo Switch.
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