Drat. Yet another ugly carpet from that smug-looking camel. Within only a few days of playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I’d noticed I was already accumulating vast amounts of unwanted stuff, be it from balloons or suspicious travelling merchants. And as that unwanted stuff gathered dust while stored away in my house, I was also having problems finding items I actually wanted. In the early game, at least, New Horizons puts limits on what you can buy on your island on any one day, with most permanent stores run by the Nook family racket. The only way around this is to negotiate trades with friends, a painstakingly slow process I attempted on our Animal Crossing Whatsapp group.
There had to be a better way to do things.
At this point, I remembered an activity I’d done back in my Girl Guides days: Geocaching, which is basically orienteering using GPS to find hidden boxes. Geocachers often bring small items to exchange with something someone else has left, such as pens, toys and various other trinkets. So what if that concept were to be applied to this situation?
And so, I set about creating a “swap shop” for my island, the idea being for visitors to bring along unwanted items and trade them for things other people had left. To kick things off, I gathered all my unloved belongings and slapped them on the ground, then created a basic wooden stake fence, signs, and floor designs to give it the feel of a trading post.