If you’re an Animal Crossing lover, you’ve probably been waiting for the game to hit smartphones for years. If you’re like me, you’ve been especially waiting for Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp ever since it was first announced a few months ago. Well, it’s out now, and it’s pretty good. It’s nowhere near as good as a real Animal Crossing game, but considering it’s a free smartphone game we’ll take what we can get.
Anyways, if you’re looking to maximize your friendships and build the best campsite and camper around, look no further. This is a quick strategy guide which will give you a few tips and tricks to make you the most popular campsite manager around. Best of all, you can do it without spending any real-life money on leaf tickets.
Add a lot of friends
At its core, Animal Crossing is a social game. Pocket Camp is no exception, and while you should focus on your animal friendships it’s also important to build a lot of real friendships too. Add everyone you see the first few days you’re playing the game, and visit their campsites and give them kudos for good measure. This way, you’ll build up a big friends list which will make it much easier to level later on (as we will see below).
List things in your market box
I know, the market box seems like a waste of time at first, because no one’s buying anything. Still, it’s worth keeping your market box full of listings at all times. This is because the minimum price you can set in your market box is still much higher than what you can sell items for usually, so you can make more bells. Also, if you have a bunch of friends, they’ll use your market box listings to complete requests, so you’ll be saving them time, and they’ll be rewarding you with money. Just set your market box listings, forget them, and replace them as needed.
Ask your friends to Shovelstrike Quarry
This is another one that relies on having a lot of friends. If you’re like me, you never want to use leaf tickets to enter Shovelstrike Quarry. So, instead, just invite a bunch of your friends to complete it with you whenever you log in. It only takes them a second to respond, and if they don’t log in before the quarry resets the invite will just disappear, so you have nothing to lose.
Build and upgrade amenities
Amenities are the cool things in the back of your campsite which start out as tents and get progressively cooler. They’re also the way to increase your max friendship levels with animals, so it’s crucial that you build and upgrade them. Even if there’s a particular style you don’t really like, just build it, get the max friendship level upgrade, and then replace it with the amenities you really do want. If you don’t do this, you won’t be able to level up nearly as fast, because you’ll hit a cap on a lot of your friendship levels.
Keep an eye on the goals
This one sounds obvious, because it’s one of the main ways to progress in the game. Still, you should always be aware of what the timed and stretch goals are to be most efficient. Whenever you log in, check the timed goals, and complete all of them that you can (since they’re time-limited). Aside from that, review the stretch goals every so often to see if there’s one you can complete. Some stretch goals are counter-intuitive, such as the one that tells you to use leaf tickets to finish crafting an item. If you’re like me, you want to hoard all the leaf tickets you can. If there’s only 5 minutes left on a craft, though, it will only take 1 leaf ticket to complete, and you’ll get 10 leaf tickets in return for completing the stretch goal. This is the type of thing I mean by keeping an eye on both timed and stretch goals.
Pay off your OK Motors loan all at once
The main mechanic in previous Animal Crossing games, which is constantly upgrading your house, has been replaced in Pocket Camp with constantly upgrading your camper. Also, instead of paying off ol’ Tom Nook, you’ll be paying off OK Motors. Anyways, there seems to be a bit of a bug with the loan repayment system (specifically, you’ll pay down a few bells and then the next time you log in your bells will be gone but your debt will be the same), so just to be safe pay off your loans all at once. Just hoard all the bells until you’re ready to pay your debt off in one fell swoop, and avoid losing money to early release bugs.
Play for hours
At first, it seems like Pocket Camp is only a game you can play for a few minutes at a time. If you’re smart, though, you can play much longer sessions than that. Here’s what you should do when you log in:
- Talk to everyone in your campsite, fulfilling all their requests and building up your friendship levels
- Talk to everyone outside of your campsite, fulfilling all their requests and building up your friendship levels
- Fish and catch bugs to your heart’s content
- Once you’ve gone and done all that, go back to your campsite, as it’s possible enough time has passed to get new requests and conversations with your campsite-hosted animals
If you play in that order, you’ll maximize the length of your sessions. Also, while fruit trees only replenish with time or with fertilizer, fish and bugs replenish every time you re-enter that part of the map. This means that you can keep switching between your fishing spots and your bug-catching spot, and basically catch fish/bugs ad nauseum until your inventory fills up. Catching more fish and bugs will also, of course, allow you to fulfill more requests and level up faster, so really you can do this as much as you want.
Hold on to your fruit
As mentioned above, fruit is the only thing that doesn’t replenish every time you enter an area (as fish, bugs, and to a lesser extent, seashells, do). So, you should hoard fruit in your inventory. In other words, when you need to sell off some items to make room in your inventory, make sure you’re only selling fish, bugs, and seashells. This way, you won’t have to dip into your friends’ market boxes every time you have to fulfill a request for fruit.
Make/link a My Nintendo account
If you currently have a My Nintendo account, link it in game. If you don’t, make one and then link it. If you do, you get a few “missions” (such as linking a Facebook or Twitter account, as you can do by pressing More > Settings > Nintendo Account Management > Account Info Management, which takes you to a webpage where you have to press User info > Linked account), which can earn you My Nintendo points. You can use these points to get clothes, bells, or craft materials. You can also get 50 leaf tickets for 0 points once you link an account, so it’s more than worth doing for that alone.
Wrapping up
That’s about it! If you follow those tips and tricks, you will have the best campsite around in no time. No matter how you play the game, it’ll all come down to fulfilling requests and building up your friendship levels, but if you follow those tips you can level up faster and get more bells. If you don’t want to take my word for it, visit my campsite at 7813 8993 253 and see for yourself!
