If you’re like countless other gamers, you likely spent the last few minutes before midnight waiting to play Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Maybe you had it pre-installed on your Nintendo Switch from a preorder or maybe you were waiting in line somewhere to grab a physical copy off the shelf (hopefully not though, social distancing and all that).
Regardless of how you got your hands on it, you still did! Animal Crossing: New Horizons is now playable!
So what is there to do so far? If you’ve played an Animal Crossing title before, you’re almost certainly aware that the games go off of the time in your time zone, going so far as to be affected by the time of year for the location you set. That sounds great – and almost any other time, it would be great – but it has a bit of a snag when you’re dealing with a midnight release.
Unfortunately, if you were playing at midnight, you likely got through the introductory stuff and then realized that your villagers were both asleep. Yes, both – you start off with two villagers, as well as the lovely Nook trio.
Because of that, you won’t be doing much socializing with your new friends, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have anything to do! The introductory stuff is simple – place your tent, then help your two villagers place theirs. After that’s done, you’ll mostly be moving forward while they go to sleep, though you might be lucky enough to have a villager that stays awake and does some fishing or some other task.
Once you go off on your own, you’ll have a modest loan to pay off to square you away with Nook’s travel and set up fees on your new deserted island. You’ll need just shy of 50,000 bells, but you’ll also find that you can pay your bills off in Nook Miles, a new currency that you earn for reaching milestones in the game.
With the game still in the first few hours of operation (it’s only been out for about four and a half hours as of writing this, after all), you still have a fun little bit to do. Chances are you’ll be able to craft your first set of tools – net, ax, fishing rod, and the like – and pick a few hundred weeds to clean up the area. The Nooks will buy your weeds, for some reason, as well as the majority of the rest of your trash.
So get out there, craft a few flimsy tools, and pass the first night of the new Animal Crossing! If you work hard enough, it won’t be long until you can upgrade your tent up to a full house and come back when your villagers are rested and ready to play.
