Tips and tricks for Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is about more than just running tasks for your animal friends. It's also about planning, strategizing, and making the most out of your chats with villagers.

If you're new to the game, be sure to run through our beginner's guide, but if you're looking for some more advanced tips and tricks, this is the guide for you.

Download Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp (free)

Your Market Box
Animal friends want to help you out
Human friends can help, too
Upgrade your tent before your animal friendships max out
Extra Tips
And the tricks, too

Your Market Box

In Pocket Camp, you have your own personal seller's market; there, you can either sell items to the Marketplace for a low price, or try to get a few Bells more by selling them to your friends. For example, you can sell a peach to the in-game Marketplace for 10 Bells, or list it for players at 100 Bells. While that seems ridiculous, remember that players need different materials for their game: 100 Bells can be a small price to pay for a player trying to get something they can't quickly farm themselves. When you sell to friends, those items in your Market Box can be seen and purchased by players whenever they want.

Here are some tips for listing items for sale in your Market Box:

List items that players can't farm fast: Bugs and fish replenish often, but fruit only drops from trees every three hours. List a couple of oranges, peaches, or pears and you're more likely to sell them than a stack of Horse Mackerel.
Sell semi-rares: If you are lucky enough to farm semi-rare items that you don't need, like a Red Snapper or Horned Dynastid, list them in the Marketplace for friends to earn a few extra Bells. It's slightly harder to find these items, and players may be willing to pay the extra cost to get these items quickly instead of attempting to farm them themselves. That being said.
Don't fill up your Market Box with ultra rare items: No one is going to want to buy your 30,000-Bell, ultra-rare Jewel Beetle. Listing it in your Market Box is just going to fill up a space that could be used to sell cheaper, more useful items to other players. Currently, no animal asks for super rare items, even at the higher levels, so they're not highly sought after by players. If you are lucky enough to find an ultra rare item, keep it in case future animals request it, or sell it to the in-game Marketplace if you really need the room
Don't sell large quantities of the same item in one box: Most people only need a couple of items at any given time, and won't necessarily want to spend the extra dough on your stack. Drop two or three of the same items into a Market Box at maximum.

Animal friends want to help you out

Pocket Camp runs in cycles. Every few hours, tasks renew, the Market changes, and your animal friends move in and out of the campground. It's important to know where your animal friends are in order to get the most out of their friendship.

First, get to know your animal friends. Each new animal you meet will give you materials as gifts. These materials are used to craft items, which are needed to welcome more animals to your campsite. Each camper offers different materials. So if you run low on a specific type of material, you can visit that friend and complete tasks.

Campsite chats happen every hour. The countdown triggers after you talk to the first animal at your Campsite. If you swap out someone from the Campsite before the end of the countdown, the countdown is triggered again and you won't be able to chat with any animals in your Campsite for another hour. Talk to everyone in your Campsite after the countdown has ended and before you swap out any animals.

To get the most out of your animal friends, rotate the ones that offer materials you need between your Campsite to the campground for the chance to get more items from them. Here's how: While in your campsite, complete any requests they need, then kick them out of your campsite just before the cycle changes (and the animals move). If those friends then spawn in the campground, you can complete three more tasks from them. Once you've done that, add them back to your Campsite so that you have the chance of getting items from them every hour; it can possibly double the number of materials you get from any one animal.

Here's an example of the best way to make use of an animal that has materials you need:

I keep Jay in my Campsite because he gives Preserves. I talk to Jay once per hour while he's in my campsite in order to try to get as many Preserves from him as possible (he doesn't always give Preserves, but he's there to chat with once per hour). Just before the animal move cycle changes, I chat him up one last time, then kick him out of my Campsite. I check the campground after the cycle changes to see if Jay is in one of the locations. If he's there, I'll talk to him to complete his tasks. Then, I immediately put him back into my Campsite so I can continue talking to him every hour. If he doesn't spawn in the campground, I put him back in my Campsite immediately so I can continue talking to him every hour.

Human friends can help, too

Don't be picky about accepting player friendships, or asking for them. The more friends you have, the more opportunities you have to buy and sell items in the Marketplace. You'll also need friends in order to enter the Shovelstrike Quarry without having to spend precious Leaf Tickets. You'll need five friends to agree to help you per entry. Agreeing is simply a matter of tapping "yes" when asked, but that means your friends need to play the game within the timeframe of your request and notice your request and agree.

Giving Kudos as part of your daily goal is the only way to earn Friendship powder, which is a material needed to craft certain items, so be sure to make new friends and give them Kudos whenever you come across them in the game.

Upgrade your tent before your animal friendships max out

Each amenity (tents or activity areas) has three tiers, and each of those tiers can be upgraded a certain number of levels. Before you move to the next tier, you must upgrade the current tier to its max level. For example, the Natural tent has three levels to upgrade before you can unlock the Picnic Set. The Picnic Set has five levels to upgrade before you can unlock the Tree House, which also can be maxed out to level 5.

If you find that your animal friends are maxed out - that is, you can't be any friendlier with them - it's likely because your Campsite tent needs to be upgraded or you need to build a specific style of tent. In order to unlock higher level friendship max, upgrade your tents!

It's important to note that you have to build or upgrade the type of tent that a particular animal prefers. If an animal prefers "cool" stuff, upgrade the cool tent. If an animal prefers cute stuff, upgrade the cute tent.

Upgrading tiers takes a long time, so plan ahead. You don't want to have a bunch of maxed out friendships and days before you can increase their level cap.

It takes 12 hours to build a new themed tent.
The Tier 1 upgrade takes 24 hours.
The Tier 2 upgrade takes 48 hours plus another 48 hours for level upgrades.
The Tier 3 upgrade takes 72 hours.

I recommend you build all four types of tents to start. That way, your max friendships across all animals will be level 7. Then, upgrade your tents as you have materials.

Miscellaneous tips

Cosmetic furniture

While the 250 Leaf Ticket cost for each of the special Tom Nook and KK Slider chairs are cool, they are nothing more than a cosmetic addition to the game. If you buy and place Tom's chair. He'll show up in your Campsite to sit in his chair and sleep. KK will show up and play music. They're cool additions, but absolutely unnecessary to the overall game progression. If I had to pick one, I'd go with KK because he plays music.

Also, if you have both Tom and KK's chair in you Campsite at the same time, only one of them will show up at a time. You won't get both KK and Tom in your Campsite together.

Amenities

You can have two different types of amenities at your Campsite. For example, you can have the Cool tent and the Natural Picnic Set or the Sporty tent and Cute tent side-by-side. You're not locked into a theme. Have fun!

Making the most of maxed out friendships

If an animal friend is maxed out, you won't get any more experience points for them. It's a good idea to "trap" them in your Campsite so tasks around the campground can be freed up for lower-level friendships.

Bonus points

When you unveil a new Amenity, five random animals in your Campsite will get 5 Experience Points. If any animals in your Campsite are maxed out, kick them out and replace them with lower-level friends so those animals have a chance to gain the +5 points.

Collect fruit later

Shake the fruit off of trees but leave them on the ground. If you don't immediately need fruit you've shaken off of a tree, you can leave it behind, saving storage for other items. You can then go back and collect the fruit later. In the meantime, the fruit tree timer will already be counting down to replenishment.

Miscellaneous tricks

A big shout out to the ACPocketCamp subReddit for finding these great in-game tricks and Easter eggs.

If you set up your campsite with nothing but lamps, your visiting campers will each walk up to one of the lamps and turn them on and off.
Log into the game on your birthday to get birthday wishes from all of your animal friends.
Closets have framed photos on their backsides, so you can use them to create interesting looking walls in your campsite or camper van