here's a link to the twitter thread posted by Ninji, a known and trusted dataminer

I have to leave for work in five minutes so I don't have much time to write my own thoughts or anything, but it appears that mistreating your villagers DOES have an affect on how likely they are to move out, but it's still based on percentages so you could still have a string of bad luck trying to get them to leave. the thread mentions ways to cheese who asks to leave next as well, and also how *when* the next move-out request is made is calculated

based on info from previous datamines, these things lower friendship:
-pushing
-hitting with a net
-gifting garbage or spoiled turnips

ignoring them, pitfall seeds, talking to them until they get annoyed, and hitting with a shovel or axe does not affect friendship

Thanks very much for posting this, Chiyoko!

I've never seen this stuff analysed in all my years of playing Animal Crossing, and it's an aspect of the series that seems to have remained shrouded in myths for a long time, so I find it interesting from a technical standpoint.

The Twitter thread is interesting too, as a specific mention is made of the same villager not asking to move out twice in a row - on an earlier patch, I actually had Ketchup ask to leave again the following week after having been told to stay. Obviously this was a bug, and going by the data it has now been fixed!

Copied text for those of us like me who don't like Twitter:

"so, here’s some stuff about how villagers in #ACNH move out. this info was collected from the code in 1.2.0, but to my knowledge, the behaviour in 1.2.1 has not changed at all

you must have at least 6 villagers living on your island before any will consider moving out on a given day, the % chance of somebody asking to move is given by (v * 5) + c, where v is the amount of villagers you have, and c is the 'MoveOutTalkCount', the amount of days since you last told a villager to leave or stay (maxing at 30)

there's a couple of conditions on that there is a 5-day cooldown after telling a villager to leave or stay - so nobody will ask to move if MoveOutTalkCount <= 5

there is a 15-day cooldown starting on the day the villager has left the island and freed up the plot (this is called the 'MoveOutSkipCount') if these checks pass, a random villager will be picked who will ask to move out

each villager's chance is based on friendship and calculated by floor((300 - a) / 10) - r

a = average friendship they have with all island residents
r = amount of residents with >200 friendship
friendship is 0-255 (starting at 25), so this starts at 27 for new villagers, going down with higher friendship levels

villagers will be excluded if:
- house is being moved
- birthday was in the last 7 days
- they were picked last time and told to stay
- moved in most recently*
because of anecdotal evidence from people, I wasn't 100% sure about the last point, which is why I've held off for so long on talking about this topic

but it's certainly *supposed* to be the most recent one; the variable is called NewestVillagerIndex and in 1.2.0, I can't find a way to make it go out of sync - perhaps there was a bug in older versions that got fixed?

either way, that's it. there is no magic method to make villagers move out, sorry. you can manipulate it _slightly_ but it's still heavily chance-based.
you can avoid the 5-day cooldown after telling someone to stay by not initiating the conversation (or by resetting the game before telling them to stay)

the next day, the game will consider letting someone else ask to leave, using the (v * 5) + c % chance I described above so, fun fact as to why this was so difficult

I have hashes for every field name in the save file, including ‘NewestVillagerIndex’

I didn’t crack it until I switched my desktop’s OS because, for some reason, the word ‘newest’ is not in /usr/share/dict/words on MacOS"

Interesting!

Now i'm curious if this formula will be tweaked in future updates, since atm, datamined claims that letters have no affect on friendship. They could be brewing something new this very moment.

Regarding the 5 day cooldown for a villager moving, is that specifically referring to active days? Would it be possible to just set my switch clock say 10 days ahead and look for whoever is wanting to move, or do I need to incrementally advance a day at a time?

ignoring them, pitfall seeds, talking to them until they get annoyed, and hitting with a shovel or axe does not affect friendship


Honestly that's a relief because all that can happen on accident lol

But I wonder if each bop with the net is -1 point or just when they lose their temper. I'm assuming when temper is lost, because pushing... one push could not be like your friendship tanks like the stock market.

^oh yeah no, it's -3 points once they get annoyed which is good because I've definitely bopped my villagers a few times by accident trying to catch banded dragonflies