3 cruel ways to make villagers leave in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

There are 397 villagers that can join your community in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but your island can only house 10 of them at once. If you’d like to fill your island with winners, you’ll have to evict a villager or two — and one of them might be Rodney. There are three ways for you to do that, bringing your island slightly closer to perfection. Figuring out what’s best for you involves deciding exactly what kind of bully you are.

How do you use an amiibo to invite somebody new to Animal Crossing: New Horizons?

You can utilize amiibo to invite a new villager to your island. Before making the move, the potential camper will ask you to craft an item. Continue to fulfill their item requests until the villager accepts your offer to move into the island.

If your island is at maximum capacity, the villager will mention striking a deal with somebody on the island to move out. You can choose the villager who they’ll attempt to negotiate with, allowing you to replace the villager with the one featured on the amiibo card.

Alternatively, if you don’t have an amiibo, you can utilize the internal island recruitment feature. If a camper from the Campsite joins your island while full, a random resident will be evicted. You can try resetting the game to make sure they replace an undesirable tenant, but the unpredictability of this method makes it a challenge.

How do you get a specific villager to leave organically in Animal Crossing: New Horizons?

If you’d like to evict a villager organically in the traditional fashion, you need quite a bit of patience. A villager that has a thought bubble over their head is often thinking of leaving, and all you have to do is talk to them to be given the option of encouraging them to stay or go.

There’s no way to guess who will receive the thought next, but you can manipulate the system in your favor. According to Animal Crossing’s preeminent data miner, Ninji, being able to boot a villager follows a few under the hood statistics:

• Every villager has a friendship level that can be increased by interacting with them positively or decreased by treating them poorly. Villagers closer to 0 are more likely to get the thought bubble.
• You need at least six villagers living on your island to begin evicting anyone.
• The more villagers you have on your island, the likelier it is that one will consider leaving.
• The likelihood of a “move out” thought bubble appearing increases by one point every day you don’t interact with somebody weighing if they should leave. This number caps out at 30 points.
• If you have a conversation with somebody about staying or leaving, the count will be reset. There will then be a five-day cooldown period before it begins again. To avoid this, quit your game mid-conversation if a villager you want to stay brings up leaving.
• Certain villagers are excluded from being selected for eviction. Those who can’t be kicked include villagers currently moving their house, villagers who had a birthday within the last week, and villagers who most recently asked to stay or go. There’s also some evidence that your most recent tenant can’t be evicted.

With all that in mind, you can try taming the system by avoiding the villager you’d like to remove. Make sure that you never give them gifts as well. Also, dabble in bullying to make them extra uncomfortable. The game recognizes bullying as hitting villagers with nets three consecutive times, pushing a villager for an extended period, and dropping a villager into a pitfall. Do everything listed, and any villager will hate you in no time!

If you can drop every conversation about moving, it should take a little over 30 days to definitely remove the villager of your choosing.

How do you use time travel in Animal Crossing: New Horizons?

Though it’s controversial to utilize time travel — manually adjusting the date and time on your Nintendo Switch console to move forward or backward in time within the game artificially — when kicking out a villager, it becomes a necessary evil. YouTuber TagBackTV discovered that you could evict just about anyone in 8 easy steps.

1. Pick a villager you’d like to evict.
2. Find that villager wandering around your island. If they’re not present, find out the hours they would wander.
3. Once you’ve found them wandering, talk to them. Also, take note of the current time and date in your game. That villager will always be outside at this time.
4. Time travel 30 days forward
5. Search your villagers for a thought bubble, implying moving out.
6. If no thought bubble is present, continue time traveling by single-day increments until one pops up.
7. Once it pops up, continue time traveling by single-day increments until it reaches the villager you’d like to evict.
8. Return to your original date with one less villager.

If you’re sick of evicting villagers and would prefer the happier activity of meeting somebody new, check out our “3 ways to get new Villagers in Animal Crossing: New Horizons” guide.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is now available for the Nintendo Switch.