A Few New Things

• You can donate more than 1 thing at a time to the museum (hallelujah!)
• Sometimes when you hit a rock with your shovel it breaks and you get a gem. Yesterday I got an Emerald. Today I got a silver ore.
• There are new flower types! While I don’t have a watering can, today there was a weird purple flower growing by the river that looks kind of like a gladiola.
• Occasionally one of your regular fruit trees gets special fruit on it. It’s a different color from the regular variety and sells for a lot more. Yesterday I shook a peach tree and got two peaches and a “delicious” peach. Peaches sell for 80. The delicious peach would have sold for 480. I planted it. We’ll see what happens.
• When bees spring out of trees—I got stung yesterday twice—their hive drops on the ground. You can sell it for 400 bells. At least I got some money for my pain.

About the town shops

There’s not too much going on at the start of the game. To the north of town are railroad tracks. Once you cross them (looking both ways) There’s a shopping avenue. A lot of the shops seem to be vacant. It *looks* like farther north there will be more shops, but it’s barricaded.

Museum

Far west is the museum. I hoped to find Brewster in there slinging his coffee (it’s my favorite ritual to go sip his coffee) and I thought there would be a second floor. But there was only one floor (I assume it expands later based on pictures I saw in magazines). Blathers still works there dozing during the day. There are four wings to the museum for bugs, fish, art, and fossils. They seem bigger so I think there are a lot of new items. I was surprised to find one of my villagers wandering around in the museum. They seem to wander freely around the shopping avenue as well.

Passport Photo Booth

East of the museum is a photo booth. It essentially takes passport pictures for 500 bells. You need a passport to visit other people’s towns. It gets affixed to your profile card. I imagine you can change it whenever you feel like it by taking another picture, but I haven’t tried since money is tight.

Tom Nook Housing

Then there is Tom Nook’s Housing (tanooki- raccoon housing in the game). Our good friend Tom Nook runs the place. He gouged me for 10,000 bells for my initial house. I paid it off this morning and chose my roof color. I should have a house tomorrow. He also sells exterior items for your house, so you can change the fence around it and your front door, etc. I’m excited to see what’s available. I tried to buy something today, but since I still live in a tent he wouldn’t sell me anything.

Post Office

Next door to Tom Nook’s is the Post office. You can do the usual post office things here, but another thing you can do is download special items there. I noticed a cute clock on the official JP New Leaf site that was available for download and thought Pete would deliver it. Nope. You get it from the post office. I’d show you a picture, but I can’t hang it on the wall of my tent.

General Store

The twins have taken over the general store and run it on alternate days. It’s rather barren in there now. They sell two items of furniture, two tools, one set of stationery, wrapping paper (which is new), and a fortune cookie (which I talked about yesterday). I assume you can wrap things up to give to your villagers. I don’t know if you put them in mail or just give things to them. I haven’t tried yet. There’s no point machine and they haven’t mentioned a catalogue. I need a catalogue…and a watering can. I got a net today. Butterflies beware!

Able Sisters

The Able Sisters shop is broken up into two sections. The first section houses Mable and Sable. They sell shirts, pants, and display patterns. Sable is still cranky and won’t talk to me which is unfortunate because I think once she likes you it unlocks pro patterns. And the QR code reader to get patterns. The KK Slider shirt that I posted from Style Savvy is available in this game. The QR code is on the official site, but I can’t get it yet. Boo!

If you go through a door to the right you get to the accessory section where you’ll find Labelle selling hats, sunglasses, and an umbrella. Her side looks kind of upscale. In the back she’s got a picture hanging with a bow on it in signature GracieGrace print.

Recycle Shop

The Recycle Shop is actually in your town, not across the tracks. It’s called R.paccas. (But the R in Japanese is pronounce more like Al because they don’t have R in the language so for all intents and purposes it’s called Alpacas). I haven’t bought anything from it yet cause I don’t have much to recycle, so I’m a bit hazy on how it works. It’s run by the pink alpacca named “Lisa”. The blue one is in there dozing in the corner. I tried to talk to him and she yelled at me.

Daily Visitors

My first run in with a daily visitor was Gulliver yesterday. I had no idea what I was supposed to do there and googling didn’t help. I talked to him several times and nothing happened. When I played later in the day I tried again and he woke up and started rambling (slow down for the foreigner Gulliver!) Apparently he crashed in the ocean and forgot where he was headed. He wanted to tell me about where he was going and see if we could figure out where it was. He said it was “full of castles” and they ate “sausages”. My choices were Germany, Poland, and France. I was 99% certain it was Germany (having visited castles and eaten sausages there myself) but he didn’t give me anything when he left, so I thought maybe I got it wrong. Maybe they have castles in Poland. They do have kielbasa after all… But then this morning I received a letter from Gulliver from Germany with a nutcracker inside.

Also this morning there was a suspicious green tent lurking in the plaza where we planted the commemorative tree (which is growing nicely along with my new apple trees and (hopefully) delicious peach tree).

I didn’t need a password to get in. Inside there were four items all 3920 Bells. Two statues and two paintings. No furniture. Curious. I was only allowed to pick one thing to buy and I didn’t get to take it home with me. After the “exhibition” Red stressed that it would be mailed to my home. I bought the statue on the left. I have no idea if he still sells fakes (probably) or how to tell. We’ll see what happens when it gets delivered.

Conclusion

I still haven’t gotten very far. I was only able to sit in the mayor’s chair today (yesterday she wouldn’t let me), and still haven’t really done anything mayoral. If there’s anything you’re curious about with the new game please ask and I’ll try to cover it.