After all this time... Finally... the last balloon color I needed to complete my entire balloon collection. Now, let's go put this back in the house for safekeeping! "Luck" is an innate feature in all mainline Animal Crossing titles which
directly impacts various things about your town and player. In the context of the original game, there are a few different versions of "luck," so today I'll be breaking it down into three categories --
those being "Fortune Luck," "Fêng Shui Luck," and "External Luck." Like a lot of other mechanics in this game,
it turns out luck is fairly involved as well... ...so let's dive in to take a closer look and explore the interesting
facets of what exactly makes you "lucky" in Animal Crossing. First, diving into "Fortune Luck," this is the the main luck mechanic in the game and is solely determined by talking to Katrina at her fortune shop. For a small price of 50 Bells, players can get their fortunes read, which can result in both positive and negative effects. Internally, there are six different "luck states" that the player can be in. By default, players are always in the "neutral" state, and the only way to change your luck state is to talk to Katrina and get your fortune read. That is, if you don't wish to gamble your luck and receive negative effects, you can theoretically never talk to Katrina and you will never have bad luck! This was actually changed in New Leaf, where your luck state is determined at the start of each day regardless of whether or not you talk to Katrina. And I actually prefer a New Leaf's system, since I think it's
pretty humorous to sometimes have to deal with unlucky days. Unfortunately, this revamped system in New Leaf was scrapped
entirely in New Horizons until the 2.0 update brought Katrina back. But even then you still have to talk to Katrina in New Horizons to get set
in a luck state, so we're pretty much back to the original concept... Anyways, in the original game, getting your fortune read from
Katrina will cause her to recite a seemingly nonsensical omen, which is different every time... Katrina actually randomly mashes four phrases together for this omen,
and each part has its own list of 32 phrases that Katrina can choose from. Doing some simple math, this means that there are
a staggering 1,048,576 possible combinations, resulting in a 0.000095% chance of ever
receiving an exact, particular omen again. Anyways, this omen is just fun flavor text, and after its recital
Katrina will then put you in one of six luck states -- and those states are categorized as "neutral luck," "relationship luck,"
"unpopular luck," "money luck," "item luck," and a general "bad luck." When receiving your fortune, there is a
50% chance you will retain your neutral luck, while the remaining five states each have a
10% chance of being selected instead. Again, each luck state slightly changes gameplay,
with some being beneficial and others just being silly fun. For example, receiving a "relationship luck" fortune will actually cause
villagers of the opposite gender to follow your player character around... which I suppose implies that they're attracted to you with relationship luck...? Anyways receiving "bad luck" instead will just cause you to trip and fall
at around a 0.17% chance per frame that you're in the running animation. This may not sound like much, but considering the 60 FPS framerate, there is a roughly 9.7% chance of tripping at any given second that you're running... So, better hold on to your balloons! The other luck states do impact gameplay a bit more though, such as
"unpopular luck" resulting in villagers flat out refusing to talk to you... More beneficially, "money luck" will increase the number of Bells you receive
per Bell bag drop from trees, the golden spot, and the money rock. Increasing your money luck is also the only way
to add more leniency on the "money rock timer," which actually means you have to "unlock" a possible eighth
money rock hit, rather than it just being possible by itself. And finally, "item luck" will increase the chance
of receiving items from your 'rare' item list from things like shaking trees and receiving gifts from villagers. This will also increase the rate at which balloon presents spawn
and the chance of Redd carrying an exclusive item in his shop! On top of Katrina, your house furniture can also impact your luck in a few ways. Animal Crossing veterans will recognize this mechanic as
fêng shui, which references an ancient Chinese tradition in which furniture and items in homes are laid out in a certain
manner to improve the flow of Qi, or energy in your life! In Animal Crossing's version of fêng shui,
*a handful of* items in the game are assigned one of five colors -- those being red, orange, yellow, green, ... ...and blu- oop- I mean "special." To follow fêng shui properly, you are supposed to place
yellow items on the west side of your house, red items on the east side, green items on the south side, and orange items on the north side. On the other hand, items classified as "special" can be
placed anywhere and will still count for the purpose of fêng shui. Each furniture item following fêng shui will improve your money or item luck, impacting gameplay the same way as we talked about previously. Item and money luck actually work on a point-system,
and fêng shui impacts this as follows: Yellow items placed properly will result in +4 to your money luck,
and red items placed properly will result in +8 to your item luck. Green items placed properly improve both luck states
at +4 each, and orange items do the same at +2 each. And finally, special items placed anywhere
grant +4 to money luck and +8 to item luck, meaning that they are the best option for min-maxing fêng shui and your luck! While your money luck value is theoretically limitless, you can
only improve your item luck up to +20 points through fêng shui. Further, similar to the last video with HRA scoring, furniture facing the wall incorrectly will deduct -5 points of item luck and -10 points of money luck... And, your luck value can actually go into the negatives,
meaning you can purposefully set up furniture in your home to result in your player having less luck than you started with;
although there is a hard minimum of -80 money luck and -30 item luck. As you might have guessed, Katrina's fortunes also work with this point system. Thus, getting a money luck fortune from Katrina adds +100 points to your
money luck, while getting an item luck fortune adds +30 points. Anyways, from this, it's actually quite easy to achieve ideal fêng shui
in the original Animal Crossing by just placing something like a few properly colored items in their respective zones
or by just placing down some special items anywhere. However, somewhat annoyingly, there is really no way
to know what "color" an item is internally assigned as... For example, the 'blue dresser' item is actually assigned a fêng shui color of red... ...like... seriously? Luckily, the wonderful contributors to the Animal Crossing megasheet have compiled proper fêng shui coloring
for every item in the game if you need assistance. Finally, while not an official classification by the game, I've decided to
also talk about something I'll be calling "external luck" in this video. I'll define this type of luck as things that the game determines randomly, with some outcomes being more beneficial than others. A great example of this is the Stalk Market price
trend, which I have an entire dedicated video about. While the price Nook buys turnips at is not directly
related to your in-game luck value in any realistic way, it is still "lucky" when the RNG calculation favors a higher price, no? And, it turns out RNG calculations in this game impact a lot of things... from the way your town layout looks, to what villagers you receive, and so on. Funnily enough, due to the amount of things this game relies on RNG calculations for, there are some cases where the developers implemented some strange code, resulting in some unlucky scenarios completely out of your control. For example, if your native town fruit is apples, cherries, or pears,
then it is exceedingly difficult to obtain oranges by yourself. See, you're supposed to be able to get non-native fruit from villagers, balloon presents, and letters... but the calculation for this is seemingly incorrect. In the case that you're about to receive a non-native fruit from
a villager or present, each fruit is assigned a value from 0 to 4. To make the fruit you're about to receive random,
the game calls an RNG function and multiplies it by 4. The problem is that this RNG function will only result
in values between 0, inclusive and 1, exclusive. This means that the RNG function will never result
in a 1, and since the game truncates down to integers, this means that the function will never roll a 4... ... And, in this case, since oranges have a fruit ID of 4, they will
typically never be given to you by villagers or through balloon presents. The only exception to this is if your town's native fruit is peaches. See, the game recognizes if the fruit you roll is the same as your
town's native fruit, and will add +1 to your roll if that is the case. And, since peaches have a value of 3,
if the game rolls a 3 when determining what fruit to give you... ...it will recognize this as your native fruit and add +1 to it,
resulting in your receiving an orange! Thus, if you have any native fruit other than oranges or peaches,
it is impossible to receive oranges like this... I imagine that this is just a strange oversight, but it is funny that some players will have to either use Nook Codes or get lucky on the island to receive oranges. So, if you have peaches or oranges as your native fruit, consider yourself
lucky as you get to obtain all the other fruit more easily than others! Anyways, this is just an example of something I wanted to talk about and included in this video because it's somewhat related to being lucky... There are actually quite a few instances of
Animal Crossing's code being riddled with oversights and bugs, so let me know if you'd like to see a dedicated video on more topics like this! Regardless, hopefully this video shed some light
on the "luck" mechanic in Animal Crossing and how you can go about increasing -- or even decreasing -- your own luck! Big thanks to Phil, Cuyler, Chubby Bub, and all the Nookipedia editors for discussing and documenting a lot of the information in this video! If you liked this video, consider checking out some of my
other videos on the more technical tidbits about this game. Further thank you to my Patreon and
YouTube Members for supporting this channel! And, as always, thank you all for watching! Until next time...
