A full detailed Animal Crossing New Horizons Villager Friendship tips and tricks tutorial is here, today's guide is all about the science behind ACNH friendship, and teaching how to boost friendship points fast in order to earn the awesome framed photos for each of your villagers.

What Is Friendship In Animal Crossing New Horizons?

Now remember that everyone plays Animal Crossing differently, some people pay little to no attention to their villagers and have really nothing to show for it; on the other hand, there are players who really enjoy their villager's company, those players can earn the unique reward in the form of that specific villager's framed photo and that framed photo is the ultimate trophy of how well you take care of your villagers. Consider it a flex especially if you're able to put it on a table right outside that villagers home.

We are talking about the framed photo as pictured above not the free posters that you get by summoning the villager within Harv's island. Those posters are very easy and simple to get while framed photos are where it's at for this specific tutorial.

How Does The Friendship System Work In Animal Crossing?

Before we get going into the fastest ways of increasing friendship, there's a little bit of science that needs to be covered so that you fully understand how the friendship system works within the game. All the villagers start with 25 friendship points as soon as they move in, you can reduce their friendship by giving them trash within the game. 

Now let's start with defining the six different favor levels and their corresponding friendship tiers:

ACNH Friendship Points Check:

Here are 3 ways to check out how many Friendship Points you have currently:

• 1. How can you tell which favor you are at, since there's no visual heart indicator, you're just going to need to pay attention to how you're being talked to based off the personality trait of your villager. Every single personality trait is different, there's about eight of them within the game and you'll start to pick up on different ways that the villager greets you.

• 2. Also if you didn't know you can use the true friends achievement in ACNH nook miles to keep track of when you hit that specific tier with a character. Once you see that little number increase from 0 to 1 or 1 to 2 then you can start counting from there.

• 3. Now one of the last ways of checking your total friendship points would be making a public works project such as a bridge or an incline, the entire total island friendship points will be converted into Animal Crossing bells with a one to one ratio daily, so you can use that strategy in order to fine tune and count how many friendship points you are getting by interacting with your villagers.

Best and Fastest Ways To Earn Friendship Points In Animal Crossing New Horizons

As you can see on the picture over here we're over at the nooks shop with Timmy and Tommy, one of the most important things in order to maximize on friendship is going to be grabbing as much of the gift wrap as possible, now it really doesn't matter the coloration so buy whatever you can. Definitely take five at a time, you're going to need tons of that stuff and it's super cheap so it's very very affordable. 

Now once you have this wrapping paper, you're going to need to grab it over here, click on wrap paper and choose whatever you want to wrap of course we're going to wrap this and we'll see over here that it is a present that you can give for additional bonus points.

Birthday Gifts:

Let's talk about birthday data, if you visit an animal on their birthday, you can earn a maximum of eight points of friendship provided that you give them a wrapped gift. The ranking system is based off of three birthday gifting tiers so we're going to go from best to worst:

Tier 3: +5 FP (bonus +3 FP if wrapped)

Mushrooms, Shells, Bugs, Fishes, or Fossiles that sell for 2000 bells or more, Cake, Turnips, Fruits Items owned/worn by the NPC, Clothes currenctly worn by the player regardless of sell value, or any other items that sell for 500 bells or more

Tier 2: +4 FP (bouns +2 FP if wrapped)

Mushrooms, Shells, Bugs, Fishes, or Fossiles that sell for 501-1999 bells, or any other items that sell for 126-499 bells

Tier 1: +3 FP (bouns +1 FP if wrapped)

Mushrooms, Shells, Bugs, Fishes, or Fossiles that sell for 500 bells or less, or any other Animal Crossing New Horizons items that sell for 125 bells or less

Trash: -5 FP

Lost items, Spolied Turnips, Tash, Weeds

The thing you want to take away from the best possible and easiest thing to give for the maximum friendship points which is going to be 8 will be gift wrapping a piece of fruit and giving it to the birthday villager. Everything else is over here that if you really want to be a troll to your villager gift wrap them a piece of trash. 

Miscellaneous Quests

Let's move on to miscellaneous quests in order to improve friendship points. Villagers can make you do quests and depending on how you do them, you can be rewarded with additional points. Performance results on these quests are always calculated either normal, good or incomplete, if they approach you with a reaction to start the quest the performance outcome will always be good. 

Quest Performance:

Normal: 

Friends: +1FP

Good Freinds: +1FP or +1FP (Random)

Best Friends: +2FP

Good: 

Friends: +2FP

Good Freinds: +2FP or +3FP (Random)

Best Friends: +3FP

With these specific quests we're going go into all of them:

Critter Catching Quest:

Villager asks for specific cirtter: Always Good

Villager asks for any critter: Good if the critter is worth ≥ 2000 bells

Normal if the critter is worth < 2000 bells

Buried Treasure Quest:

Treasure Hunt with short timer (hard): Always Good

+1 FP if you found the treasure outside of the time limit & talk to Villager to end quest

-1 FP if you didn't dig up the treasure before talking to the Villager

Lost Item Quest:

Good: If you find it and return it to the correct Villager WITHOUT a hint

+2 FP Bonus if you return it to the correct Villager without them asking you to find it first

Sickness Quest:

Good: If Villager mentions sick Villager & you deliver meds

Normal: If you deliver Medicine without Mentions

Nothing: If you don't give it to them on the first try

-1 FP If you LIE and say you have Medicine but there isn't any in your pockets

Note: Only Sick Villager receives FP

Delivery Quest:

+3 FP to quest giver upon completion

+3 FP to Recipient for unopended delivery

+1 FP to Recipient for opended delivery

If you fail to deliver on time:

-1 FP to quest giver if unopened item on-hand

-2 FP to quest giver if opened item on-hand

-3 FP to quest giver if you haven't opend the delivery and it's not on-hand

Basic Ways of Increasing Friendship Points

Now each of these points is going to be based off of what you can do per day:

+1 FP: Talking once per day

+1 FP: Selling an item to Villager when prompted

+5 FP: Catching Villager's Flea

+0 FP: Sending Letters

-0 FP: Ignoring Villager

-3 FP: Pushing Villager or hitting with bug net

-3 FP: Apologizing afterweards (rare chance)

Forced Selling for FP:

1. Have a common critter on-hand

2. Spam talking to villager

3. Villager will offer to buy critter

4. Gain +1 FP

5. Repeat Daily

Single Day Friendship Exploit:

1. Hit Villager with net until angry

2. Apologize

3. If Villager sings, talk to them for +3 FP

4. Repeat for +3 FP until 150 for max

5. If Villager doesn't sing, rest & repeat

Daily Gifts:

Once you reach the good friend's tier and have 60 friendship points you can give a villager a gift every single day, ensure that

every single gift you give them is wrapped for an additional one point:

+1 FP Bonus: Item is gift wrapped

+3 FP: Furniture Item

+2 FP: Flowers, fish, insects, net, watering can, fishing rod, love crystals, favorite music, umbrellas (for non-frog villagers), clothing of preferred color or style

+1 FP: Umbrellas for frog villagers, non-preferred clothing, anything else not mentioned above

-2 FP: Trash

Gift Exchange:

Since you're on the good friend's tier there's going to be a gift exchange between you and the villager provided

that the item that you give them is based off of a certain criteria:

Sells for < 250 bells (1000 price): You Get - Nothing

Sells for ≥ 250 bells (1000 price) but < 2500 (10k price): You Get - 50% bells or 50% villager item

Sells for ≥ 2500 bells (10k price): You Get - 100% Villager Item

Gift Exchange Bonus FP:

Gift exchange is super important because it gives you extra points for the day,  so strive to do something that nets you that. Based off of how many friendship points you currently have,  you'll get additional points:

+1 FP Bonus: Friends

+2 FP Bonus: Good Friends

+3 FP Bonus: Best Friends

If you receive Bells, you don't get these bonuses.

Here are the best and the fastest ways of earning friendship points, now you can reach best friend's status and achieve 150 points needed in order to receive that framed art in as little as 24 days. 

More Tips & Schedule On Boosting Your Friendship Points In Animal Crossing

In the review you can see a quick spreadsheet that showcases a bare minimum route from when a villager moves in to max friendship. If you choose to go that far keep in mind that there will always be times that you can earn more than this. 

• - To start off with a villager starts off with 25 friendship, and if you simply talk to them for five days you'll earn good friend status and the ability to start giving gifts to speed up the process at day 6.  

• - For the next five days, you'll be earning at least six points daily one by talking to them four by giving them a wrapped furniture item for a thousand bells, and one additional point for the villager giving you something in return and you'll reach 60 points by the end of day 10.

• - On day 11 you'll already be in the good friend's category, and be earning an additional point for the gift exchange for a total of 7 points, do this all the way through day 23 and then you'll have over 150 friendship points.

• - If you have more than 150 friendship points, every single gift exchange will have a chance at giving you the villagers framed photo anywhere from 6% to 10% of the time, so if you don't receive the frame photo move to the next day and try again it will happen.