It’s been a while since I went into my Animal Crossing game. I was doing it through January to create little Snowboys. This is the last one for the year, and probably forever. The little game that helped me get through the pandemic has just about reached the end for me. I know it was originally aimed at kids, and I’m old enough (and my kids are young enough) that I watched both of my daughters play very early versions of this game.

The Snowboy puzzle is the last thing I managed to solve so that I could consistently create “perfect” snowboys without even thinking about it. Every time you create a perfect snowboy you get a large snowflake. All snowboys last three more days after creation, so you can get a maximum of four large snowflakes. If you come back the next day and create a second perfect snowboy, the process starts again, and runs in parallel with any existing snowboys. You can, if you play every day, get four large snowflakes every day until you get tired of making snowboys or collecting large snowflakes. And of course the large snowflakes allow you to make DIY winter items.

I’ve been playing Animal Crossing on the Switch Lite that my oldest daughter gave me as a gift back in 2020, and I don’t ever intend to give it up. It was a sweet gift and I intend to cherish it for as long as possible.

Another New Years Eve Day! How wonderful. To celebrate I visited Animal Crossing after leaving it alone for some time. I was a big player during the pandemic, but I dropped it except for the occasional check just to see what happens in a virtual environment like Animal Crossing when it’s allowed to go “fallow.” So far nothing out of the unusual. I did do a little bit of cleanup, moving items around and minor changes elsewhere.

For example, back around the first of December, I put some Christmas ornaments out front of my cottage. Animal Crossing allows for the storage of items, so after making the ornament trees several Decembers ago, I just pull them out when I need them. Same for the door decoration.

I still have my robot and Apollo Saturn 5 model in the common area, but I moved them a bit to allow better walking between and around them. Of course no photo of Animal Crossing would be complete without a photo bombing from a floating balloon.

I reached a point a while back where I’d completed just about everything; I’ve got over 20 million bells and 800,000 Nook Miles. No need to travel, and nothing left I want to purchase and build. And after purchasing the Happy Home Paradise DLC, I’ve built the minimum number of homes and unlocked all the island buildings in the section, so going back in is now a bit of a chore instead of something new to explore.

I won’t give it up or delete it, considering how many hours invested in all aspects of the game. Now it’s become an irregular way to relax, where I fire it up about once/month on average.

I finally got my Animal Crossing big robot, or Jeager for you Pacific Rim fans. I had every item to build one except a recipe to build the Saturn 5/Apollo moon rocket with launch pad. The picture above shows the robot next to my avatar, with the Saturn 5 in back. I was gifted with three of the Saturn 5 items by my youngest daughter, who just happened to get the recipe and had more than enough supplies to create three of them for me. I used one to build the robot, one to just have out in the open, and I put the third one away in storage for later.

I’ve spent so much time in this game world (for an adult) that I’ve dropped to about one quick visit/month, just to pick up the weeds and look at all the mail. I’ve done everything including running through the minimum required in the Happy Home Paradise DLC to build all the buildings on that island. I think that’s designing houses for 30 characters.

I got started when the COVID19 pandemic kicked off. As the lockdowns and the worst parts of the pandemic fade into the past, the desire to play any game on the Switch is also fading. There’s too much to do IRL to be caught up in a fantasy world like Animal Crossing.

P.S.

If you tap on the robot, it will light up and laser beams will briefly flash out of its eyes.

A year ago I was talking about creating Animal Crossing Snowboys, and the difficulty of making sure the ratio between the head and body were correct so you could collect the single large snowflake they’ll produce when you make that “perfect” Snowboy. There are all sorts of how-tos on the web describing how to consistently pull that off. This year something’s changed in the game. I can quickly roll up my “perfect” Snowboy without going to all the trouble I did last year. This year the process of making Snowboys is faster and the resultant Snowboys are a lot smaller. I certainly haven’t developed any in-game super powers that I’m aware off. I can still goof around and make them top heavy like I did last year, and I have a number of times. I guess all I can say that’s different this year is I don’t care if I make them perfect or not. And it seems that I’ve make quite a few perfect Snowboys this winter season.

Or just maybe enough Animal Crossing gamers yelled loud enough that Nintendo got the memo and fixed the algorithm.

creative animal crossing gameplay

You can get tired of playing a game the same way, day in, day out, especially if game play is over multiple years (this pandemic period, for example). I’ve been making Snowboys for at least two winters, and I’ve collected 200 large snowflakes from them. I’ve also collected 190 regular snowflakes, the kind you “catch” with the net. And that’s what’s left of both types after building the DIY projects that require both regular and large  snowflakes. I have the luxury, if you will, of getting a little goofy building my Snowboys. This is the last panel that’s displayed in the sequence when you do what I just did. I think I’m going to make all my Snowboys just like this until the snow disappears for spring. It will be interesting to see how it melts…

My youngest daughter found an extra Animal Crossing DIY recipe for a lunar rover and gifted it to me in-game. The recipe calls for ten star fragments, ten iron rocks, and four old tires. The old tires have to be found randomly while fishing, and they take a while to collect. But collect them I finally did, and so here we are, my avatar with his lunar rover in front and satellite in back.

The lunar rover is part of the Animal Cross Space Theme (  https://nookipedia.com/wiki/Space_Theme ). So far it looks like I have three in the Space Theme: the satellite in back, the lunar rover in front, and the flying saucer on the back part of my island. I don’t know how many more are left to collect, or when the recipes will show up. But having just these two together is a bit of fun.

That little guy with the pirate beard is my avatar on Animal Crossing. I’ve been playing since mid-2020 when my oldest daughter and her husband gave me a Switch Lite as a gift. It’s one of a very few games I’ve downloaded and owned as a pure digital asset. I usually prefer to have the physical cart I can plug into the Switch.

Over the many hours I’ve played the game I’ve amassed many in-game Chotchkies and in-game valuables such as bells (I have over 11 million). One of the valuables are do-it-yourself (DIY) recipes for many items. One of those DIY recipes enables the creation of the satellite you see hovering in the photo above (and yes, you do have a camera to take in-game photos which are selfies of your avatar and their immediate environment). I even have rockets, but they aren’t Falcon 9s, and I can’t send my satellites into an orbit over my island. The bigger issue is that while the satellite will hover, you can’t walk underneath it. That makes putting up many of these over my island a non-starter. I know that you can put items that hover and that your avatar can walk under, as I ‘bought’ a number of Mario blocks that did just that. To make the satellite behave like a Mario block would require a software change, which I doubt we’ll ever see.

The game is still fun, and every once in a while the opportunity presents itself to capture a bit of silly fun. As in this direct screen capture off the Switch while in this particular cut screen. The emotion on my avatar’s face says it all.

I go through spurts of game play on Animal Crossing. The last started back at the last major update in November. I’ve seen enough of the new work, so it’s time to put it aside and put those few daily hours I spend on this to better use.