Animal Crossing may not be the first game that
comes to mind when you think of speedrunning. I mean, by sheer gameplay design,
Animal Crossing is quite the opposite of a "speed game." Regardless, when there's goals to be accomplished in
a video game, people will always find ways to fit in a speedrun. Today we dive into the unorthodox speedruns of
Animal Crossing, the mechanics behind starting a good run, and a few tricks and glitches that runners use
to clear the game's categories as fast as possible. There are some pretty cool setups to discuss here,
so let's take a closer look! First, it's important to note that this video will not be
looking at the speedrunning history of the game or its categories. That is, I will not be focusing on individual runner records or
progression over time for each category, at least not in this video Rather, I'll instead be focusing on the current runs and
detailing some of the mechanics and setups runners use to start their speedruns as fast as possible. I will also only be focusing on the North American
GameCube version of the game. So, let's establish what exactly an Animal Crossing speedrun is... Given that the game is meant to operate in real time with
no real sequence breaks or true ending... ... how exactly do you speedrun this game? Well, like most games, runners basically set
common goals that are achievable in the game and simply race to see who can complete them the fastest. For Animal Crossing, these goals include paying off
your house debts, collecting all the golden tools, and even 100%ing the entire game by essentially
clearing all of these categories in one run. Sounds simple enough, and, on paper, it is. However, Animal Crossing is notorious for being one of the
most brutal games to actually run competitively. This is of course due to the game's
heavy reliance on randomized events... ... and if there's one thing
speedrunners hate, it is poor RNG. The amount of RNG dependent things in
Animal Crossing is quite staggering, and the difference between good RNG and poor RNG can,
and will, result in literal hours of time difference. And this is apparent at the very beginning of the game. No matter what category you're running, you'll always have
to start on a fresh file, talk to Rover, and create a new town. And yes, we are already at our first roadblock,
despite never even setting foot in our town yet. Fans of Animal Crossing will know that each town's layout is
essentially randomly generated, following a few predetermined rules. If you've played the original GameCube game,
you'll be familiar with the acre system, where the game's map is essentially split into thirty squares. Each of these acres are actually predesigned and, barring
some special acres that are always in the same spot, the game essentially randomizes the location of each acre
until it lands on a town that it considers valid. There are of course stipulations on what can be generated here,
like how a river must continue appropriately throughout acres. After all, it wouldn't really be appropriate
if a randomized town was truly random and gave you a bunch of acres meshed
together that didn't really make sense. Regardless, the code for this town
generation is still somewhat asinine... It appears that, when the game attempts to generate a town,
if it generates an acre that is considered invalid... ...it won't stop there and try again. Instead, it will actually continue generating the entire town. Only once the entire town is generated will the game
then realize that the generation is considered invalid, and it will restart the entire generation process over again. This approach means that you technically could get unlucky enough
and have the game generate multiple invalid towns over and over, restarting the process each time... Since town generation occurs at the start of
the game right after the K.K. dialogue, the screen fade to the train cutscene can
actually take a bit longer for some players, depending on how quickly the game generates a valid town. So, if the game gets stuck generating invalid towns over and over,
the game will just hang on a black screen until it finds a valid town. Although, the odds of this downtime being
more than one second is pretty low. Anyways, despite this weird approach, so many things in an Animal Crossing
speedrun are dependent on the actual town that is generated. Simple things like having Nook's Cranny one acre closer to your house,
or having villagers houses grouped close together, can actually save several minutes, or even hours,
of time depending on the category. If you've played this game or watched my videos before, you'll notice that this game pauses for about
half a second every time you go in-between acres, which definitely adds up over a lengthy run... That said, the importance of good town RNG cannot be understated. Your town generation is actually so important,
that competitive runners will often reset over and over until they get a town that is deemed fit to continue their run. I mentioned that town generation occurs
right after the initial K.K. dialogue, but as a player, you cannot actually see what
your town looks like until four minutes into the run... This means you have to go through the entire
Rover train dialogue and get your house from Nook all before being able to check your own town map. And if the town isn't to your liking, you'll have to reset and do
that entire intro-sequence over and over again. To give you an idea of how crazy this is,
the current 100% world record, held by BrianMp16, reset for nearly FIVE HOURS just to get an optimal town layout. Anyways, once you've completed the intro-sequence and found
a town you've liked, you're now actually ready to start your run. What runners do from here depends on the category that they're running. However, for starting out, what you'll most likely want to do
is have a way to get a lot of money quickly. This is, of course, essential for many aspects of the game, but is especially important in an all-debts speedrun where the goal
is to pay off all of your home debts as fast as possible. Considering you need a hefty 1,413,600 bells to pay off
every home debt, what is the fastest way to get your money up? In the past, this actually involved an item duplication
glitch to sell expensive items to get bells quickly. Using a Nook Code password, you can receive the autumn medal item,
which is one of the highest selling items in the game, selling at 14,000 Bells per. So, our strategy simply involves the autumn medal and a 2x1 table. And with just these two items, we are ready
to abuse a duplication glitch. The glitch is performed by abusing the "walking-on-tables"
glitch I discussed in my HRA video. Essentially, you can abuse furniture collision while running and precisely
drop a 2x1 table, which causes your villager to shoot up on top of it. From here, you can then drop the autumn medal item on top of this table,
and then pick up the table itself while standing on it. This effectively tricks the game into thinking that the
autumn medal is now a table that items can be placed on top of. And, dropping your home's default radio on top of
this medal is the key to item duplication. If you do this, reloading the room will cause the objects to swap places, and then you can now pick up the
autumn medal from on top of the tape deck. Reloading the room again will cause the autumn medal to respawn,
so you're free to essentially pick it up and duplicate it over and over. This is a pretty fascinating glitch, and if you don't
really understand the reason why this happens, it can admittedly be very strange to see in action! This occurs because your house interior is actually split into
four layers, each stacked on top of each other. The base layer essentially stores all of
the items that are present on the ground. The next layer is for storing items that are
on top of ground items, such as items on tables. And layer three is for storing items on top of layer two...
and layer four is for storing items on top of layer three. With this logic, you might think that the last
two layers here are unused, since you can't really place items on top of
items that are already on tables. Well, the game actually uses this layer system
in a specialized way for both radio and storage items. Whenever you put a song into a radio, the game
essentially places the song item on the layer above the radio, and, for all intents and purposes, it's
basically just unrendered to the player So, by detecting that there is a song on the layer above the radio, this basically tells the game that the radio has a
song loaded into it and the radio can now play that song. Typically, the only way to remove a song from on top of the radio
would be to interact with it and remove it from the dialogue itself. That is, the game never expects you to be able to manually
reach up and remove an item from on top of the radio. Because of this, if we end up manually placing an item on top
of the radio, it will consistently respawn there over and over. To simplify things, the game basically treats the item as a song and it thinks that it should still be on top of the radio because
we never went through the radio's dialogue to remove it. This exact same process occurs with storage items like dressers as well. Since you can store up the three items inside a storage unit,
this explains why there are four house layers total -- one for the storage item on the ground floor, and then one
layer each for each item that you put "inside" of it. So, with that explained, this duplication process can
of course be replicated on each tile of your house, essentially allowing you to get rich quick by
duplicating multiple sets of medals per reload. However, in a speedrunning context, this is actually a dated strategy, and it is actually a bit more time efficient to use turnip price
prediction to get the most amount of money. I won't dive into this too much since I already have
an entire video covering how this is achieved, but, essentially, runners can use certain aspects of the
game as an input to figure out what the RNG seeds were when determining your turnip price trends. Specifically, the current world record route uses
the type of train station you have, your villager mailing list, and the furniture present inside of Nook's Cranny
to predict what your turnip prices will be. This means the run now starts on a Sunday morning and notes down all of
this information in real time to predict what the turnip prices will be. If you find a favorable price spike day, the run will continue,
and you simply abuse the Stalk Market, and the fact that Nook will buy at 8x the selling price, to quickly
get to the 1.4 million bells required to pay off your debts. However, since we're not duplicating items in this route, we of course
need to have a way to get bells to buy the turnips in the first place. And, in this case, it's as simple as using a Nook Code
to get the starting bells that you need. And, on the topic of Nook Codes, they are an integral
part to a lot of Animal Crossing speeduns... ... So let's talk about them! I've mentioned before that one of the coolest exploits in
Animal Crossing involves custom Nook Code generation and the fact that you can embed specific characters into these codes. This is, of course, a powerful tool for speedruns as not only
can this be used to obtain a vast majority of items in the game, but it can also be used to cause Tom Nook to recite
special characters and execute code elsewhere. If you're unfamiliar with my other videos on this topic, Nook Codes
are generated off of your player name and town name, and Tom Nook will recite these when receiving a code. For example, if I set up a Nook Code password
with my player name set as "Hunter," then Tom Nook will appropriately tell whoever
enters that password that it is from Hunter. The game essentially has no checks on the characters that can be input here, so you can use any of the game's valid characters during this process. The list of valid characters in Animal Crossing is hex-based
and is essentially an altered version of standard ASCII. The most important character for our purposes
is this blank character at hex 0x7F. This is is the 'universal control command' character
and it serves as a special instruction in the game. Whenever the game comes across this character, it will use
the characters that follow it to execute specific code elsewhere. So, by specifically generating a Nook Code with this
instruction character within our player name or town name, we can cause Tom Nook to recite this character,
which tells the game to do a vast amount of things. For the purposes of speedruns, the most useful things we can do
is set our player's luck state, disable the background music, and do things like set dialogue speed. Using a Nook Code to set our luck state actually affects how much
money we receive from the money rock and the golden spot, which can be important during a speedrun to get quick bells. Further, using a Nook Code to disable the background music
actually causes map transitions to occur slightly faster since the game no longer has to load the music. In more lengthy runs, like 100%, this can actually save several minutes! And, again, this can all be achieved by just
inputting a specific password to Tom Nook. We can actually kill two birds with one stone here and
also set the gifted password item as a 30,000 bell bag to both obtain bells and activate our proper control codes at the same time. As a final note on these Nook Codes, the speed at which you
input them is also a crucial factor when speedrunning. These codes are quite lengthy, so getting familiar with the
game's keyboard UI is essential to becoming a competitive runner. To further speed up this process, runners actually use
custom "fast codes" that repeat a lot of characters, making entering these codes a lot easier and faster! This is possible because Nook Codes have
a near infinite amount of character combinations, and scripts have been developed to find some of the
most ideal combination of characters in terms of speed, which is quite impressive! Outside of these specific exploits, the vast majority of Animal Crossing speedrunning comes down
to pure routing, execution, and... of course... sheer luck. For instance, using specific Nook Codes are not allowed in
categories like "golden tools," else the run would be quite boring. Instead, categories like these rely on a lot of RNG for catching
all of the fish and bugs to obtain the golden tools. Your odds in these categories can be somewhat manipulated
with decent town RNG and specific tree or flower setups, but it is still largely dependent on luck. And, of course, specific bugs and fish have different
spawn rates depending on the time, season, and location... ... so a large portion of Golden Net and Fishing Rod runs
involve proper routing and time management. And yes, the 100% run basically combines every
other Animal Crossing run into a single category, making it the true beast of routing and time management. In fact, the 100% category is so long that you'll
probably even have to route food and bathroom breaks to cover the entire 16+ hours that you'll be playing the game for... Needless to say, I probably won't be attempting a
speedrun like this anytime soon... If you're curious about Animal Crossing speedruns,
routing, or just viewing the world records, I've linked the game's speedrun.com page in the description! Further thank you to my Patreon and YouTube members for
their support, with special shout outs to my highest tier members... And, of course, thank you all for sticking around and watching! Until next time!
