Animal Crossing: New Horizons - How To Become Best Friends With Your Villagers & Earn Unique Gifts

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a gentle game that’s all about improving your desert island community. By inviting villagers to move in, you can spice up your mini-society and gain new friends to talk to. These random animals each have unique personality, likes and dislikes, and they’ve all got a unique gift waiting for you.

There’s a hidden ‘friendship’ system in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Once you reach a certain friendship level, and basically become best pals with you island occupant, they’ll reward you with a unique headshot of themselves. If you’re like me, you’ll place that pic in a place of extreme importance — a centerpiece in the home, showing all the friends you’ve made.

But, if you’re also like me, you just learned that this was even possible. For the longest time, I had absolutely no idea that villagers could become ‘better’ friends with you. Not only that, but dataminers have discovered that specific gifts will increase your friendship status faster.

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If you’re the type of person that just loves making your villagers happy, then you’re not alone. The Animal Crossing obsessives over on Nook Plaza extracted the game code and developed a special tool to help you select the best possible gifts for your villagers.

Villagers have a friendship rating between 0-255.
To get a special picture frame from a villager, you can gift items to villagers once per day.
Clothing items are the best gifts to share.

To find the best clothes for your villagers, go to NookPlaza.net and select the Villager Gifts tab. Just type in the name of your favorite villager to create an outfit that villager would love to get as a gift — the tool uses datamined information about each villager to automatically generate outfits based on their interests.

It’s a powerful tool, and all you need is the villager’s name. There are two point amounts you can earn by giving great gifts to your villagers.

Furnitures gives you +4 friendship points.
Clothes that match your villager’s style give you +3 friendship points.

Clothes are trickier to give away, but there’s one huge bonus that furniture gifts just can’t beat. When you gift a villager furniture, there’s a chance they’ll place the furniture in their house, automatically rearranging everything in their rooms. If you’re creative and like to curate your villager houses, this will totally ruin everything.

Hence, you’ll want to give them clothes inside. If you don’t care how wild or messy your villager houses can become, you can take the (slightly) easier route and just bury your friendly villagers in furniture gifts.