Animal Crossing: New Horizons tool helps you pick the best villager gifts

Nook Plaza, a huge database fansite for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, now has a useful tool for picking out gifts that your villagers will actually like.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has a hidden friendship mechanic which is tracked depending on your actions. Giving gifts and completing tasks for the villager will increase their friendship, with certain items rewarding more friendship over others. You’ll want to increase your friendship with a villager if you want to earn a villager’s photo, and if you’re serious about that, you can give them something nice once a day to move the gauge. Friendship seems to works on a point-based system, with 0 being the lowest value and 255 being the highest.

Giving villagers gift-wrapped furnishings will reward four points, but the villager might place the furnishing in their home, thereby messing up their home set-ups. To avoid this, you can gift villagers clothing. Nook Plaza has a very helpful tool that will generate outfits to give villagers that will yield the most points, based on the villager’s preferred style and color preferences.

Image: Nook Plaza via Polygon

To access it, click on the “villager gift” tab. Once there, you can simply search for the villager you want and it will spit out some suggestions. If you don’t like them, you can click on the “find something magical” to get a different set of results. The tool uses directly datamined information regarding friendship points and gifts.

By gift wrapping clothes from this generator and giving them to the respective villager, you can earn three points without wrecking their homes.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

Once you get high enough friendship with a villager, they’ll give you a token of appreciation — a photo of them. Note that these are different than the posters you can get by bringing the villagers to Harv’s Island for a photoshoot. These photos are framed and can be placed on desks or mounted on walls. They also have a quote from the villager when you interact with it. The frame can also be customized.

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