Making best friends with your favorite villagers in Animal Crossing New Horizons is an interesting and fulfilled thing. Similar to real life, conversation and gifts can promote your friendship. The photograph of your wanted villager can be obtained as a reward as long as you reach a certain friendship level. From the basics of the mechanic, we are going to cover how to increase friendship in Animal Crossing New Horizons and the fastest way to max it.

Animal Crossing New Horizons Friendship Guide - What is Friendship?

Animal Crossing friendship is a measurement of how friendly the player is with a villager, in New Horizons, high friendship level can help you get a picture of the villager. The positive represents friendship and negative means dislike. There are many ways to increase friendship or lower it. 

Animal Crossing New Horizons Friendship Guide - How Friendship Works?

Villagers start with 25 friendship points. Here are six different favor (favorite) levels with corresponding friendship tiers and points.

Favor level 1 (friend): 0 - 29 points

Favor level 2 (friend): 30 - 59 points

Favor level 3 (good friends): 60 - 99 points

Favor level 4 (good friends): 100 - 149 points

Favor level 5 (best friends): 150 - 199 points

Favor level 6 (best friends): 200 - 255 points

The favorite level can determine what players can do with the villager. For example, at favor level 5, you're going to be able to earn their personal framed photo, and on top of that, you'll be able to change their greeting. At favor level 6, that's where a villager can buy or trade furniture with you from your inventory. You can get a picture of the villager after becoming best friends (level 5 and 6) with him/her. 

How to check friendship level in Animal Crossing New Horizons? You just need to pay attention to how you are being talked to based on the personality trait of your villager, every single personality trait is different, there's about eight of them within the game and you'll start to pick up on different ways that the villager greets you. If you didn't know that, you can use the true friends achievement in Nook Miles to keep track of when you hit that specific tier with a character, once you see that little number increase from 0 to 1 or 1 to 2 then you can start counting from there. Another of checking your total friendship points would be making a public work project, such as a bridge or an incline, total island friendship points will be converted into bells with a one to one ratio every single day, so you can use that strategy in order to count how many friendship points you are getting by interacting with your villagers.

Animal Crossing New Horizons Friendship Guide - Different Ways to Increase Friendship

Lots of things you can do to add your friendship points and raise the level:

- Talk to your villagers 4 - 5 times a day

- Visit an animal on their birthday with a gift

- Daily gifts (flowers, fish, insects, furniture, umbrellas, etc.), make sure it’s wrapped 

- Sell Animal Crossing items when they request or want

- Provide medicine when they are sick and stuck at home

- Catch fleas on their head

- Provide new greetings, nicknames, and other requested catchphrases

- Play games with villagers

- Return lost items

Note the birthday gifts have multiple levels and each level rewards different friendship points. The type of daily gift will also influence the FP.

List of friendship points of different birthday gifts:

Level 0 - Trash, Lost Items, Weeds, and Spoiled Turnips (-5 Points)

Level 1 - Mushrooms, Shells, Bugs, Fish, and Fossils that sell for 500 bells or less and any other items that sell for 125 bells or less. (3 Points + 1 if wrapped)

Level 2 - Mushrooms, Shells, Bugs, Fish, and Fossils that sell for 501-1999 bells and other items that sell for 126-499 bells. (4 Points + 2 if wrapped)

Level 3 - Mushrooms, Shells, Bugs, Fish, and Fossils that sell for 2000 bells or more, any other item that sells for 500 bells or more, Cake, Turnips, Fruits, Items already owned or worn by the villager, and clothes currently being worn by the player when the gift is given. (5 Points + 3 if wrapped)

List of friendship points of different daily gifts:

- Trash (-2 Points)

- Umbrellas (for frog villagers), non-preferred clothing, etc items (1 Point)

- Flowers, Fish, Insects, Tools, Love Crystals, Favorite Music, Umbrellas (except for frog villagers), and clothing of favorite color or style (2 Points)

- Furniture (3 Points)

Animal Crossing New Horizons Friendship Guide - How to Increase Animal Crossing Friendship in Fastest Way?

What’s the best and the fastest way of earning friendship points in Animal Crossing? Check out the tips for maxing out the ACNH friendship.

- Give proper gifts to earn more points

- Each friendship point you gained is based on what you do. If you strike up a conversation with villagers and talk to them, you can get an easy one friendship point, if they prompt you in a normal conversation, to sell an Animal Crossing item to the village for an additional one point.

- If you have a low selling critter like a sea bass or a common butterfly, keep spamming conversations with them until they offer to buy it from you for an easy one friendship point, you can do it every day, it's pretty rare but sometimes you'll see a villager with a flea on their head, so use your bug net catch the flea, you'll earn 5 points.

- Note that there are things do not reward any points, such as sending letters or ignoring them entirely or even talking to them until they refuse to talk anymore, you don't lose anything from doing and not gain anything.

- If you push the villager around or hit the villager with a net, you will lose three friendship points, if you hit a villager with a net and apologize directly afterward, there's a small chance that you can earn three friendship points instead of losing them. 

- If the villager ends up singing after you apologize, you can use this strategy to technically bypass skipping days and giving daily gifts by soft resetting before the autosave within the game, if the reaction isn't a positive one, once you reach the good friend's tier and have 60 friendship points, you can give a villager a gift every single day, make sure that every single gift you give them is wrapped for an additional one point.