Animal Crossing: New Horizons datamine provides details about how villagers move out

Animal Crossing: New Horizons dataminer Ninji has shared the latest behind-the-scenes information about the Switch game. After poking through the code, some details were discovered about how villagers move out.

Here’s the full breakdown:

– You must have at least 6 villagers living on your island before any will consider moving out
– On a given day, the % chance of somebody asking to move is given by (v * 5) + c, where v is the amount of villagers you have, and c is the ‘MoveOutTalkCount’, the amount of days since you last told a villager to leave or stay (maxing at 30)
– There is a 5-day cooldown after telling a villager to leave or stay – so nobody will ask to move if MoveOutTalkCount less than or equal to 5
– There is a 15-day cooldown starting on the day the villager has left the island and freed up the plot (this is called the ‘MoveOutSkipCount’)
– If these checks pass, a random villager will be picked who will ask to move out
– Each villager’s chance is based on friendship and calculated by floor “((300 – a) / 10) – r”
– a: average friendship they have with all island residents
– r: amount of residents with >200 friendship
– friendship is 0-255 (starting at 25), so this starts at 27 for new villagers, going down with higher friendship levels
– Villagers will be excluded if: house is being moved, they were picked last time and told to stay, or moved in most recently
– There’s also a birthday check involving the exclusion of villagers; currently unclear, but this checks on if their birthday was within the last 7 days or is coming up in the next 7 days
– Villagers may also be excluded if they have a birthday in the next 7 days rather than_ in the past 7 days
– You can avoid the 5-day cooldown after telling someone to stay by not initiating the conversation (or by resetting the game before telling them to stay)
– The next day, the game will consider letting someone else ask to leave, using the (v * 5) + c % chance described above

Ninji notes that he was a bit hesitant to share news about this topic since he wasn’t completely sure about the last point based on anecdotal evidence from players. However, this is supposed to be in the latest version of the game.

Ultimately, one of the main takeaways is that there is no surefire method that forces villagers to move out. While it can be manipulated slightly, it’s ultimately chance-based.