Animal Crossing fans find a complex item duplication glitch

Animal Crossing: New Horizons players keep finding increasingly complex item duplication glitches. First, there was the cloning glitch that required two separate players and a spinning item. The next worked under highly specific circumstances — 2x1 items could be duplicated by rotating them around a table. Now, there’s another one that lets you duplicate any item you can send in the mail, but it’s got a heckuva lot of steps. Oh, and it’s also essentially a speedrun.

To do this glitch, you’ll need three separate characters on your island, moveable mailboxes, and two Joy-Con controllers. But before you begin, you’ll want to move mailboxes close to your Resident Services plaza to make things quicker — but if you can’t do that, there are still ways to make this work. It’s just harder.

YouTube creator Benjamin Daws of Do Whatever Games posted the glitch on YouTube on Tuesday. Daws told Polygon he noticed something was up when he would play on multiple characters, which was a thing he did to make fish or bug models. “I’d go around and get the mail, then switch to another character basically right away,” Daws said. “Then later when I checked that character again, the same present would be re-attached to the letter, even though it was currently in one of the houses or something.” Then he started testing.

Here are the steps, straight from the YouTube video:

Image: Do Whatever Games/YouTube

Another YouTuber, BenXC, was able to replicate the glitch, too. He noted that there’s a time limit that starts from when you call in the second player, which Daws referred to as Mr. A. You’ll have around one minute to do the steps before the game autosaves, he said, and you want to complete everything before then. Otherwise, the game will “remember” that you’ve already collected the items with Mr. A.

“I’m guessing how it works is that the autosave will save the mail, and ending the session will save the mail-status of everyone currently playing,” Daws told Polygon. “But the save when you switch characters apparently doesn’t save the mail-status. So if you take the items out with one character, and swap them out a new character (via the pick residents again option) without the autosave happening, the world and your inventories get saved, but the mailbox doesn’t, then when you end the session, it only saves the mail status the the characters right there, and not the currently absent one who retrieved the items.”

We haven’t been able to test this glitch out on our own, but there are now plenty of videos on YouTube demonstrating how it works.

If you’re up to the challenge, though, that’s on you. Like we’ve said before, some people consider these duplication glitches cheating. And like the other glitches in this game, this one is likely to be patched out. Though this one is more time-consuming, it’s got a lot of impact on the game — particularly, that you can clone materials and Nook Mile Tickets, too.

You got Raymond in boxes? We can all afford him now, baby.

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