Villager hunting is a fun activity in New Horizons. Island hopping allows the player to attempt to find a villager they want or their dreamie. Finding your preferred villager is difficult. The villager that appears on an island is basically randomly generated. The game first calculates a 1 in 35 chance for each species, since there are 35 total species of villagers in the game. Next, the game decides which specific villager in that species is picked, so, for cats, that's an additional 1 in 23 chance. Multiplying those together equals a one in 805 chance of finding little ol' Merry. Or any other cat for that matter. Cats are the most populous species in New Horizons, so, if you do the math, that means any cat in the game is the rarest spawn while island hopping. This means that, yes, Mr. Raymond here is one of the hardest villagers to find. You might be wondering how to  find out whether your dreamie is actually "rare." The easy way to find out is by looking at how many villagers are in that specific species. The less populous that species is, the less rare that villager is. An octopus is your dreamie? Good! You'll be able to find them pretty quickly. A cat or rabbit is your dreamie? good luck, you might need hundreds of tickets while finding them. Also, while island hopping, you won’t be able to find the villagers that are already on your island.

The way the game calculates which villager you will find on an island works out so the species with the least number of villagers will have the most appearances. Quick example, there are three octopuses in the game, so there's a one in 105 chance of you finding one on an island compared to the one in 805 chance of finding a specific cat. For example, when you are hunting Merry the cat, there is Zucker the octopus on your island, which means it was only possible to find 2 octopus on an island rather than three. That one in 105 chance turned into a one in 70 chance of finding an octopus. 

Where Are The Missing Villagers?

What you guys are probably most interested in is where the missing villagers go. Thousands of islands you hopped to, why did there still have villagers you missed? Does this mean those villagers are extremely rare? Uh. No. It just happened. RNG might not in your favor when trying to find those missing villagers. For example, The four cats you keep missing, which make some sense to be since cats are the rarest species, as do the squirrels and ducks, they're both pretty common in the game. The strange ones are the species that weren’t able to be completed while your island-hopping journey, they have a small number of villagers tied to them, like Kangaroos. You might be thinking, it’s possible the whole thing was based on the Move-in queue? Bingo! The move-in queue is a hidden line up for the next villagers to move into your island if you leave that open plot open. If you do not ask a villager to move in either through your campsite, at a mysterious island, or through your friend's in-boxes villager (one that is moving out and has their furniture in boxes) then the game will place one of your move-in queue villagers there. 

How do villagers get in your queue? 

The most likely answer is these villagers come from your friends' islands if they have had one of their neighbors move out and that neighbor is in their void. When an animal moves out of your island, many times they are stuck in your void waiting for other players to come to your island and scoop them up. This is how you get neighbors that say they are from a different player's island when they move in. It's because you visited their island and picked up a villager from their void who then stayed in your move-in queue until the day you forgot to island-hop or just gave up and wanted the game to choose a random villager for you. With that being said, villagers that you let move of your island are not impossible to find. It seems like villagers in your void you can find again, just not those you've picked up off other's islands and are in your move-in queue. So, mystery solved, the rarest villagers are actually the ones in your move-in queue. since you can never find them on mystery island tours.