Is there anyone out there struggling like us? (Excluding the time travellers of course) Redd, one of the new NPCs never shows up and that really slowed down the museum artwork collections. A player started doing some data mining and figured out the pattern of the NPCs visitation.
Just in case you are still new to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, it is a game where the player arrives on a selected island as the resident representative with up to 10 other animal residents living together. The player has the ability to decorate the island freely and building shops and a museum. Making the game even more interesting, a random NPC will appear on the island every day. At the moment, these include,
- C.J., The fishing beaver,
- Celeste, Blathers’s sister,
- Daisy Mae, Turnip salesperson,
- Flick, Insect-loving Chameleon,
- Gulliver, The washed-up seagull,
- Saharah, The carpet, wallpaper and flooring trading camel
- and many more.
After the April update, Redd, the fox that sells artwork and Leif, the sloth that sells shrubs and flower seeds are added to the random NPC list. With this new NPCs added to the list, players may start to realise there are some NPCs that rarely shows up on their island and here is where the research starts pouring in. We’ve often seen @_Ninji share a lot of Animal Crossing information on Twitter and this time @_Ninji used data mining to explain a certain pattern for the appearance of random NPCs.
so, here’s the tea on #ACNH NPC spawns
every week, you’re guaranteed to get Saharah, Kicks and Leif on weekdays (if you meet their criteria, e.g. having Able Sisters built)
that leaves two weekday slots that will be randomly filled by Gulliver, Label, CJ, Flick or Redd
— Ninji 🇪🇺🏴🇬🇮 (@_Ninji) May 14, 2020
Our interpretation is that it seems to be that during a week’s time, a set of guaranteed NPCs will show up while the remaining days will randomly be filled by NPCs that ‘rarely’ show up. To simplify things, players can bump into Saharah on Monday, Leif on Tuesday, and Flick on Wednesday. The remaining days can then be randomly filled by Redd, Celeste, C.J. or Gulliver. In addition, day slots are taken when players unlock K.K. Slider to appear on Saturdays and Daisy Mae is fixed to appear on Sundays.
Image via @WWG on Twitter
Another tweet from @_Ninji also pointed out that if players missed a certain NPC, that NPC will have a higher chance of appearing next week. As for the night NPCs, Celeste and Wisp have a different algorithm. Celeste will only appear on cloudless nights with a possibility of a meteor shower and Wisp may appear every night.
Image via @GoNintendoTweet on Twitter
We can understand by now this game is heavily dependent on probability and scratch the thought of maybe Redd just hates us. Hopefully in later updates, Nintendo can adjust to this and bring out more ways to meet the rarer NPCs!
