Animal Crossing Pocket Camp brings Nintendo’s gentle charmer to the mobile screen. Anyone familiar with previous entries in the series will feel right at home on this free to play mobile game. For players looking to jump right in but also have some basics on hand, this guide is to give you the best start possible along with what to expect and some things to consider as you play on.

First things first, download the game for Android or iOS. Okay good, now you’re ready.

Choose A Campsite

At the very beginning of the game, you’ll have to choose an Animal Crossing Pocket Camp campsite, based on a number of factors. There’s the sporty campsite, natural campsite, cool campsite, and the cute campsite, each of which has its own benefits. Attracting different animal personality types. Just like yours at the start of the game.

Visitor personalities will matter once you start crafting the second tier of amenities. These require Essences to craft and Essences are pretty rare. You earn them either by completing goals (Timed and Stretch) and leveling up your friendships with your visitors. That sounds like a lot but every time you want to increase the level of your amenity requires another batch of Essences.

The best way to manage this is problem is, once you’ve unlocked all four second-tier amenities, to pick two of the personality types and focus on them exclusively. Only invite to your campsite visitors with those two types. Prioritize requests for these types over the others. That way, you spend more of your time getting the Essences you need for later on. Don’t worry, you’ll still earn enough Essences from the other two types to make whatever you’ll absolutely need to craft. You just won’t have to worry so much about running out of the ones you really need a horde of.

Step Up Your Cotton Game Early On

The most important crafting material early on is cotton due to all the first-tier amenities requiring it to craft them. Amenities unlock the level caps on your visitors and you’ll hit the first cap within the first couple of days of play so crafting them is priority #1. The best way to get a bushel of cotton is to make friends with the locals.

Every animal visitor rewards your efforts to improve your friendship with a particular crafting material. If a visitor hands over cotton, mark them as a favorite in the Contacts screen and do everything they ask of you. Also, get to work crafting the stuff they want to see in your campsite. The goal is to get your relationship with them leveled up quickly so you can invite them to stay at your campsite. This makes them available to chat and makes requests from them much, much more frequent. Once you unlock all the second-tier amenities, you can diversify away from cotton.

Earning Bells and Leaf Tickets

It wouldn’t be an Animal Crossing game without bells. But since this is a free-to-play mobile game too, a new currency joins the series too: Leaf Tickets. (Essentially, this is Animal Crossing‘s clever way of saying “dolla dolla bills y’all.”) Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Leaf Tickets are the game’s more premium currency. Technically, you can pay real money to get them, but there are other ways to get Leaf Tickets too.

Run Errands 

The best ways to make any sort of currency—whether it’s things for crafting, Bells, and Leaf Tickets, is by fulfilling requests from your local animal neighbors. In turn, you’re given all sorts of goodies as a sign of your good service. Eventually, you’ll be able to befriend the critter and invite them to your own campsite, where they offer you more requests.

Remember that you can tap on any animal to talk to them, and you’ll level up their friendship meter every time you bring them the items that they requested. Every time you level up a friendship meter with someone, you’ll always be granted useful items like Bells.

Shake Trees

One excellent way of scavenging for items quickly is to tap on a nearby tree, as this will cause items to fall out, most of which you can then take to your animal friends. 

100 Free Leaf Tickets

For a quick way to earn Leaf Tickets, you can connect your Nintendo Account to the game. Currently, it’s unknown if the apparent cloud-saved data will be able to carry over into the North American and beyond release, but in the meantime, it’s a quick and easy way to get 100 leaf tickets, which are useful in speeding up crafting, building things, and more.

What To Spend Your Leaf Tickets On

A Second Crafting Slot

You get one crafting slot from the beginning but with timers that stretch upwards of 7, 10, and 12 hours, just one slot can feel limiting. A second slot is not very expensive and provides flexibility for you to keep crafting. You can spend Leaf Tickets on a third crafting slot but it isn’t as critical as the second.

Supplementing shortfalls of rare materials

Requirements for the late-game amenities get pretty steep and running out of rare materials (like Essences) become a real possibility. Leaf Tickets can make up for it but they will often run at least 100 Leaf Tickets if not much more (depending on how short of materials you are). When your animal visitors are hitting their level caps, it’s best to spend a little to unlock that next amenity.

More Inventory Space

Consider this an optional recommendation. If you don’t want to janitor your inventory, go ahead but it’s 20 Leaf Tickets for only another 5 spaces. I’m okay with having to manage my inventory a bit more but some players aren’t.

Store Rare Bugs And Fish

Hold onto these finds until you get to the middle- and late-game. Once you get your animal visitors to around level 10, they’ll start requesting the uncommon fish and bugs. They’ll pay full Market Box price too (1,000 Bells) which helps to offset the growing costs of crafting and camper loans. For the truly rare finds, hoard them.

Hold Onto Fruit And Shells

Specifically, the fruit you only have one tree of. There are six different kinds of fruit and for three of them, you’ll only have one tree that grows it. Trees take three hours to grow another three pieces of fruit so store up on these. You can even shake fruit off a tree and leave it on the ground. It won’t rot or time out so you can always have six pieces of fruit on hand (three on the tree, three on the ground).

Shells are deposited on the beach in a random fashion at random intervals which makes it hard to farm them. Keep several of each kind in your inventory to stave off running out.

That’s all we’ve got for now if you’ve discovered anything else let us know! In the meantime happy camping!