Animal Crossing: New Horizons
The Turnip game in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is unforgiving. Actually it’s very forgiving—it’s not that hard to go on Twitter and find someone with a decent price—but it’s still fun to cosplay as a high-stakes Wall Street trader as you transfer root vegetables from pigs to Raccoons. Turnips make the world go ‘round, and I spent the past week better trying to better understand how Turnip prices fluctuate, and how best to maximize my chances and get the best return.
In the wake of Animal Crossing fever, old hands were able to figure out an old truth from New Leaf: Turnip prices are not entirely random, and can be predicted based on a limited number of pre-set patterns. People suspected this at the beginning and then confirmed it with datamined info: this led a couple of people to build online tools that you could theoretically use to predict your turnip prices for the week within a certain range. Naturally, I’ve been given them a try.
I decided to compare two tools: Turnip Calculator and Turnip Prophet. Both are essentially the same, asking you to input your turnip buy price and every subsequent price from both the morning and afternoon from Monday onward. They both have little charts that show you where you’ve been, and where you might be, as well as guess for your daily maximums and minimums. The biggest differences is that Turnip Prophet gives you more information about the potential price patterns you might be experiencing, and Turnip Calculator looks a little slicker.
Both tools were able to give me rough approximations of my turnip prices for the next day, if not further than that. It wasn’t until Thursday AM that they seemed to be able to really narrow down what I was seeing and give me some real predictive numbers. Those turned out to be true, if not encouraging: I was on the dreaded “decreasing” pattern, where the number just goes down every day after buy day.
Both sites returned basically the same information, which isn’t surprising given that they’re both based off the same datamined info.
So I’d call these things definitely interesting and mildly useful: I’ll need to use them for another week to get a better sense, especially since your last week’s pattern gives them extra information to work with.
