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Show HN: A site to keep track of critters you can catch in Animal Crossing

ac-catch.com

182 pointssawyerjhood45 comments

Fun fact: Katsuya Eguchi incepted the game as a result of his move to Kyoto to work at Nintendo - because he missed his family and friends from his hometown.

"Animal Crossing features three themes: family, friendship and community. But the reason I wanted to investigate them was a result of being so lonely when I arrived in Kyoto! Chiba is east of Tokyo and quite a distance from Kyoto, and when I moved there I left my family and friends behind. In doing so, I realised that being close to them – being able to spend time with them, talk to them, play with them – was such a great, important thing. I wondered for a long time if there would be a way to recreate that feeling, and that was the impetus behind the original Animal Crossing."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katsuya_Eguchi

And now Animal Crossing is helping millions of lonely quarantined people across the world cope with the current state of things. It really came out at the perfect time.

This looks great! I too have been working on a critter tracker[0], but writing it in C using kcgi[1] (no JS at all).

I have never done a web project before, so this has been a great learning experience. I still have some functionality to complete, but so far it has been pretty useful, even just the "available now" feature.

[0] https://xvetrd.tilde.institute/index.cgi

[1] https://kristaps.bsd.lv/kcgi/

This triggered memories of fishing for Coelacanths in the original Gamecube Animal Crossing. Twas an amazing game, and sounds like it still is.

Original GC AC works great on the Dolphin emulator and you can get HD textures these days.

They made it a bit easier in ACNH. Best streak I got was six in a row during hard rain.

Everything is easier in ACNH. Even though I’m making much faster progress, it’s not as satisfying.

Well there seems to be more story and less grind, which makes me quite a bit happier honestly.

I'm nowhere near it, but I can't wait for the KK plot to play out.

Little off-topic but can anyone here compare to Stardew valley? I feel like I’ve kinda “finished” stardew after going through the core story and wondering about switching trains

I've played ~20 hours of Stardew Valley and ~10 hours of Animal Crossing so far, and the vibe is totally different. Animal Crossing is slower paced and very relaxing, whereas Stardew Valley is much more story/character driven. IMO the point of Animal Crossing is personalization, and making the island your own space, which I enjoy. It really helps me unwind at the end of the day.

At some point, playing Stardew Valley felt like real work, and that's sort of when I lost interest.

The big crazy difference is that Stardew Valley goes faster while AC is real-time and this is... super frustrating.

I love that AC is real time, that has been one of the bigger draws for me since the original.

Few games have events around real life holidays (in real time), and give you a sense of jumping on to see what today has in store.

If AC is a game you try to rush through, then it may not be the game for you. But if you go in understanding and accepting it for what it is, you’ll enjoy it more.

For me, this is less about trying to rush through, and when I have time to actually play.

That means that some days when I want to play, everything is closed, because it's too late in the day, and others everything is closed because it's too early - and the game punishes you for changing the clock to fit more than one of those circumstances.

The two games have totally different vibes, which is fine. AC is more for relaxing and unwinding, while SV is more of a story-driven/objectives-based game.

Agreed.. was a bit disappointed by AC when I was hoping for something more like stardew valley. Would love a recommendation for something like that if it exists.

You could try the original franchise from which Stardew Valley was cloned from: Harvest Moon (also know as Story of Seasons) or it's Spin-off Rune Factory.

There is also Graveyard Keeper, which is similar in vibe and mechanics, but with a very different setting.

Rune Factory is the usual comparison. Rune Factory 4 just re-released on Switch and I played a decent chunk to tide over my AC longing before it launched, and I quite liked it. Much more story focused, combat, and not real time.

You can simply cheat around the real-time-effect. Powergamers do it all the "time".

Stardew gets much more intense than AC. AC is chill, slow. No hard consequences. No mistakes..

It is fun though.

Stardew Valley is a min-maxer's dream. I think you'd go mad trying to min-max Animal Crossing if it's even possible.

What did you think of stardew? I thought it was addicting but terrible. Like an awful cellphone game.

I liked it but I was on a mission to complete the community center and the mines and then was done. So I didn’t pour myself into the farm too much, and the game had a decent end point. But I could totally see someone playing it differently

I’m trying to avoid looking at any outside guides for a good while, so I can experience things for myself.

But when I eventually give in, this guide will be handy!

Looks great on an iphone! How did you get the pics?

Someone ripped the images from the game [1] and uploaded them to a fan wiki [2], implicitly misrepresenting the content as CC BY-SA, and then this site hotlinked them.

[1]: https://animalcrossing.fandom.com/wiki/Thread:150357#2

[2]: https://animalcrossing.fandom.com/wiki/Fish_(New_Horizons)

Great work! I’m curious, how did you get all the critter info?

I get a blank white page. What tech is this coded in?

Looks like React to me.

Very well done website, thanks for hosting this!

My friend also made one that shows bugs/fish available at the current hour in your timezone to practice python: http://critter-catcher.herokuapp.com/

Showed it to my wife who's been playing, and then I heard a bunch of clicking and now it's circulating in the Discord channel she hangs out in. Nice work!

Thanks so much! I had a mind to work on this the other week (even started up a boilerplate) and then got distracted. So glad you stayed on task more than I did.

Great stuff, thanks a lot!

May I ask where you get the data from?

Per the repo:

> All of the data is currently generated from the animalcrossing Fandom wiki.

> We have a static process which will scrape the site, download the images, and generate files to be used by the main app.

There’s an official strategy guide available, so I would guess that was the original source.

The strategy guide hasn't been published yet, so my guess is this comes from someone who data mined the game.

Is there a button to reset? I clicked on one to see what happened and now I can't undo.

You can scroll to the bottom to see all of the caught critters and uncheck them there

This is awesome. Did you or someone else illustrate the icons? They're beautiful.

The fish/bug pictures are straight from the game. All of the other icons (hemisphere, bells, length, etc...) are made by a combination of my girlfriend / myself.

Nice work!

I like how it is first sorted by fish/bug that will be gone next month.

Very cool, just what I needed.

This is great! Thank you.

This should have been built into the game. Nintendo fans are so forgiving of glaring flaws.

There's an in-game app called the Critter Guide that does bugs/fish and what months they're available. It requires you've encountered said bug/fish at least once though I think for it to appear in the guide

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