Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a game about stuff.
How much cool stuff can you get? How much stuff can you buy? Who can get the most stuff? Who can get the rarest stuff? You ask yourself these questions, and then you look on Twitter and see some amazing stuff you've never seen before, and you begin the quest for stuff all over again.
There's no one way to get all this stuff, either. You can shake a tree and get a new desk for your living room. You can catch a couple hundred fish, sell them (forget about that Blathers dude) and purchase a whole bunch of stuff. Or, like millions of Animal Crossing enthusiasts, you can go the get-rich-quick route and test the stalk market.
Turnips are Animal Crossing's way of making you broke or, if you're lucky, a Bellionaire (for the uninitiated, Bells are the game's currency). You buy turnips on Sundays -- by the tens, hundreds or thousands, depending on how big your bank account is and how much money you want to risk on the weekly speculation game. You then have until 11:59 p.m. Saturday to sell your turnips at the local market before they spoil, with prices varying each day and no guarantee that you'll profit from the venture.
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With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Animal Crossing players have extra time to explore the turnip market and try to get on the fast track to paying off their house loans and for construction projects in the game. But how do you get past the problem of running into low prices for your turnips?
Simple: You go to other players' islands. And luckily for you, there's an app -- and a subreddit, website and much more -- for that.
Here's a look at how Animal Crossing players around the world are banding together to get the most out of their turnips and turn the stalk market from an unpredictable roll of the dice to a sure thing each week.
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'We're helping a million people now'
When I said millions were searching for turnip answers, it wasn't an exaggeration. In fact, it might have been an underestimation.
After all, 1.3 million people are using Turnip.Exchange, a site that is an adaptation of Warp World's MultiQueue tool. The site hit that number of individual buyers and sellers after just two weeks of operation.
MultiQueue was developed with streamers who wanted to allow viewers to file in for games such as Super Smash Bros. and Super Mario Maker. Warp World CEO Matthew Jakubowski said his team saw an opportunity to adjust the queueing service to help turnip traders. As his company's motto goes: "Do cool s---."
"Our big focus is creating tools that we ourselves would use. We tend to find missing elements in games and other services," he said. "We thought it'd stay in our circle of users around 30,000 or so, but we have reached 1.3 million unique users on the site with over 100,000 islands hosted on the site and 2.5 million queued on the site."
Warp World's Discord has grown, too, with more than 22,000 new members in the past two weeks. The growth has meant long hours for Jakubowski, who's up at 10 a.m. lately and heading to bed at 5 a.m.
On average, Turnip.Exchange draws around 900 hosts at any given time, with a bot protection service known as Kasada staving off automated attacks. Jakubowski, who has a background in internet security, knows the owner of Kasada and jokingly put 10 million Bells on the line for anyone who could crack into Turnip.Exchange with a bot.
Even with the large quantity of hosts and tools to prevent disruptions, there are thousands of people queued up for entry to islands at any given time. The massive influx of traffic has boosted costs for Warp World, too, which is using revenue from its other products to compensate for costs associated with running Turnip.Exchange. The company's Patreon page has seen a slight bump from $1,000 to $1,100 per month in donations.
Jakubowski said his company has never had this much reach, especially this quickly, but will keep its doors open to the Animal Crossing community as long as there are turnip traders looking to line their surprisingly large pockets.
"It doesn't matter to us the cost of things as long as we're able to do it," Jakubowski said. "Knowing that we're helping a million people now is really an amazing feeling. I wouldn't be staying up 'til 5 a.m. if I wasn't excited about people using it and people weren't excited about using it."
It's Sunday, and that means it's turnip time! How much are you investing in Sow Joan's Stalk Market today? #ACNH #AnimalCrossing pic.twitter.com/jlzVXSvT6V
- Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) April 5, 2020
Developing the stalk market
Since Animal Crossing: New Horizons' launch on March 20, everyone from casual fans to cryptocurrency experts has tried to crack the secret behind the turnip trade.
Nintendo insists that the market is a random game with no algorithm behind it, despite the best efforts of others to find a method to the root vegetable madness. That's why subreddits and tools such as AC (NH) Exchange and Warp World's Turnip.Exchange site have become crucial tools for big-time buyers.
AC (NH) Exchange is the work of Devon Bernard, a 25-year-old software engineer and full-stack web developer who interned at Microsoft and Google while in college. He has worked on projects with companies such as Enlitic, which collects data and uses machine learning to interpret CT scans, X-rays and MRIs and assist radiologists with patient diagnosis. Now the Animal Crossing newbie has developed an app that lets players link up to buy and sell turnips.
"I've been coding since I was 13," Bernard said. "Sometimes, it's just really nice for me to put my head down and hack on stuff and code for a few days or an all-nighter here and there.
"It's kind of a creative outlet. If I had to go a really long time without coding, I'd be pretty bummed out."
Bernard lives in San Francisco, which has been under a stay-at-home order with all but essential businesses closed since March 16 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Trying out a new app with functionality across iOS and Android seemed like a fun challenge in the midst of the lockdown, so Bernard went after it. His app uses Captcha to prevent bots from accessing queues and allows users to limit the number of people in line for their island. It also includes a rating system for both guests and hosts that allows people to judge whether a trip to a random stranger's home is worth it for those sweet, sweet profits.
"Version 1 took three days, and it was in the App Store," he said. "That was just kind of, like, coding from the early morning, 10 a.m., up until 3-4 a.m. Since then, I've pulled three or four all-nighters just to add new features and deal with all that traffic."
Bernard learned about the game from his girlfriend, who has been a fan of the series for years. She has also been a sounding board for feedback and new features, such as a collections page for keeping track of bugs, fish and fossils a player has gathered in the game and potential item trading in the future.
What started as a way to answer his partner's problem -- slogging through social media and Reddit for hours to find a good turnip price -- turned into an app that is averaging 5,000 new sign-ups per day, with around 25,000 users as of Wednesday. Bernard said AC (NH) Exchange will also launch on Android once Google completes its review of the app. He has been flooded with messages from users and people offering help, from quality assurance testers to two designers and four fellow engineers. He has also received requests from others to open a Patreon account so users can support his work financially.
For now, he's putting that out of mind and focusing on the next iterations, with a couple more all-nighters on the docket.
"I enjoy engineering. I think it's fun," he said. "The fact that it does help a lot of people further enjoy stuff and have fun with the game is pretty nice, too."
A subreddit blossoms
The r/acturnips subreddit was a peaceful place before the release of New Horizons.
A subreddit moderator who wished to remain anonymous -- they didn't want to use their real name because they didn't want 111,000 "turnippers," as they're called, searching for their email address -- said the mods expected a few hundred people using the site once New Horizons launched. That would match the volume during Animal Crossing: New Leaf, the Nintendo 3DS version of the game released in 2012 and updated in 2016 to support Nintendo's amiibo platform.
"I was a junior member of the mod team in New Leaf days, so I don't really know how much more effort it was, but there was nothing like it is now," the moderator said. "There are hundreds of posts per day. I spend a few hours a day reviewing, but I try to do it in bursts."
As of Wednesday, r/acturnips has around 125,000 members, with between 10,000 and 15,000 visiting the subreddit at most times of the day. The page is full of people looking to make a quick Bell, either by selling high -- a good sell price for turnips is anything above 400 Bells, with prices going as high as 700, from what I've seen -- or buying low on Sundays. It's also littered with people trying to scam others, bots, trolls and savage businesspeople who don't care for their fellow villagers. The seedy underworld of Animal Crossing exists, and it has found its way to this page and others.
"There are a lot of great tools that can help predict prices so you know if you are going to have a chance to make a profit in your town, but to get big money, you need to rely on a community," the moderator said. "No one gets a great price every week. I had a 406 in my first week and nothing over 200 since then. You need friends to make big Bells.
"If you don't have a friend group who are playing, then places like r/acturnips offer a chance to make Bells."
They also offer a place to make friends -- or at least, they did when the community was a bit smaller. Now, with hundreds of posts a day, it's tougher for users to make personal connections. There's definitely some humor amid the fast-paced posts, however, with traders taking jabs at the raccoons that run the shop where you sell your turnips. A few examples:
"Trash Pandas selling at five five six."
"Tanuki hustlers buying for 561."
"Little Bastards selling for 608."
The ubiquity of Animal Crossing right now -- be it because of the Nintendo Switch being a mainstream product, ongoing coronavirus lockdowns or some combination of the two -- has led to massive traffic for places such as r/acturnips and its sister sites. The page has three affiliated subreddits, including r/ACTrade and r/RateMyMayor, as well as r/ACVillager, which launched this past weekend. The expansion is part of an effort to divvy up the hundreds of thousands of users who have specific needs into specific areas.
"We were just this chill, little community who knew each other and had community standards that we hadn't necessarily articulated, and then this massive wave -- I called it a barbarian invasion -- came," the moderator said.
Despite the stress of managing that rapidly growing community, they're pleased that the work they do might be helping others feel some small satisfaction in a time of international crisis.
"I am hoping the people who like the game in the way the New Leaf fans liked it will stick around," the moderator said. "Animal Crossing is a game that encourages community and sharing and all that great stuff. I am hanging out with my friends every day, looking at their outfits and what they've done with their house. It's definitely helping to counter the effects of physical distancing."