Exploring the City

Animal Crossing:?City Folk Exploring the City

Your hamlet is no longer the only place in the Animal Crossing universe you can visit. From day one, whenever you want to explore the nearby city, just head over to the bus stop, hop on, and take a ride! Note that the first time you do, Rover will talk about WiiConnect24, the service used to keep all Wiis connected all the time. We'll talk more about that in the Connecting to Friends section.

Most of the shops in the city open at 10am, so you may want to hold off visiting the city early in the morning. They're open late though, so unless you're like me and primarily play games at like two in the morning, you'll be to check out all the sights late at night.

Shampoodle is a small building on the right side of the city, run by a poodle named Harriet. She'll give you change your hair style for a fee, but she has a much cooler feature than that: you can select a Mii model and wear a "Mii Mask." This will give you the appearance of any Mii on your Wii, letting you possibly play the game as yourself! This costs a nominal fee as well, and you can only have one Mii Mask at a time, but you can head back to the city once per day to change it up.

Note that if you change the Mii in the Mii channel, your Mii Mask will do the same. If you delete it, your Mii Mask will disappear to. To remove your Mii Mask (or put it back on if you take it off), you need to go to the Design menu, rather than your Items menu. In the top-right corner will be a button that you can press to toggle your mask.

Perhaps the most important building in the city (and definitely the most important one for completionists) is the auction house, located just past the fountain on the right with a Gyroid sign. Run by a Gyroid named Lloid, the auction house (AH for short) is a place for buying and selling random items, but especially Gyroids and rare items like silver or golden tools.

Auctions are a bit restricted in the AH. First of all, all auctions are "blind auctions." For those not in the know, this means that you can't see what the high bid of an item is: you simply bid on an item, and hope your bid is high enough to win it. If it is, you'll get the item by mail; if not, you'll have your money returned by mail instead.

You can place items yourself up for sale, and set a reserve price (the absolute minimum amount you'd be willing to accept). However, you can place only a single item at a time. Once it sells or fails to sell, you can place a different item up there, but only one at once.

Lloid has a magic power in the AH though, where he can look at any of your storage areas from the AH itself. This way, you don't necessarily have to have the item you wish to sell in your pockets: you can magically pull it out of thin air from your dresser or whatever, speeding things up considerably.

Katrina resides on the far right of the town, and she'll tell your fortune for a measly 100 Bells. Fortunes may inflict minor gameplay changes, such as making a particular animal friend like you more. None are game-breaking, but you may as well take advantage of a positive fortune if you've got it.

Better still, Katrina can give set up a charm that increases a player's overall luck. She'll make a minor quest (like catching a goldfish in your hamlet), and succeeding will net the player a charm. The catch is that you cannot get the charm: it must be a visitor from another town!

Naturally, this works best when you have a friend regularly playing with you. You both activate your city's charms for that month, then visit each other's towns and do the appropriate quest. Luck increases, everyone is happy, you both gain tremendous advantages over players who still play Animal Crossing solo!