Technical Content

Currently Playing: How Does Animal Crossing Generate Your Town?

Before terraforming, we had to reset for hours to get an ideal Animal Crossing town… Let’s take a look at how town generation works in the original game. ‣ Support on Patreon: https://patreon.com/hunter_r ‣ Become a channel member: https://www.youtube.com/@Hunter-R./join ‣ Follow me on Twitter: https://x.com/xHunter_R ‣ Follow me on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/hunter-r.com Notes / Corrections — • The presented order of town generation mostly follows the game, but some liberties were taken to make explanations easier without jumping back and forth and showing walls of code at the start. • Whenever I say things are “flagged”, “masked”, or “mapped” to each other, it’s just to explain it easier. Most things I described here are not bitmasks or custom structures with attached variables, but instead exist separately in lookup tables and arrays. • 01:53 Note that “gates” are not attached to acres from the start, but instead exist in a lookup table for each block type later on. — Acknowledgements / Credits — @Cuyler : code decompilation, tools @AmeHart : acre images, map icons Animal Crossing Decompilation Project: https://github.com/ACreTeam/ac-decomp Numerical Recipes in C: https://cnl.gmu.edu/facility/NumericalRecipesinC.pdf — Music credits: — • Go K.K. Rider! - Qumu Remix: https://youtu.be/7sf69i5PwUM • K.K. Disco - Qumu Remix: https://youtu.be/5rB1_dsZ4ZU • Kapp’n’s Song - Sam Yung Piano Cover: https://youtu.be/I27cLsLMxK8 • Resort Hotel Lobby - New Horizons • 6 P.M. - Animal Crossing • 8 P.M. - Animal Crossing • Nook’s Cranny - New Horizons • Slumber Island (Day) - New Horizons • Resort Hotel Decorating - New Horizons • Gracie Grace - New Leaf • 11 A.M. - Animal Crossing • Harv’s Island (Day) - New Horizons • Re-Tail - New Leaf — 0:00:00 Introduction 0:00:54 The Acre System 0:02:30 Generation Basics 0:05:17 Cliff, River, and Building Generation 0:07:55 Finalizing Acres 0:09:10 Triple-Layer Towns 0:10:19 Seeded Randomness 0:12:14 The RNG Function 0:15:00 Final Cleanup 0:16:01 Bonus Round 0:16:48 Acknowledgements