• zoe here, just a reminder that if you want things added/removed from the doc, dm either me (zoe#1811) or drjay (DrJaysAnatomy#4258) on discord instead of requesting editing access
• 5/13: If you would like an organized way to record your campsite visitors while aiding our data collection, please head over to: https://dodotracker.com/!
• Updated 5/27. Still compatible with most recent patch.
• Update 6/11: If you complete a full cycle of personalities while missing a few, it is possible they are in your move-in queue. For more info on this please message ctar17#3628 on Discord, or the #data-mine-info channel on the AC:NH server.
• Update 7/20: Debunked some theories and improved clarification on some FAQs
• Update 7/26: Made the selection mechanics much more clear. Also thanks to Ahri#1337 for clarification on most parts

THE CAMPSITE GUIDE & FAQ

“It's important to note that visitors to the campsite are less likely to have visited or lived on the island in the past. This means you have a better chance of seeing potential residents that you haven't met before. You also have a good chance of visitors having a personality type that none of your current residents has, unless of course you already have an ideal mix of all personality types.”

• ACNH Companion Guide

Common Misconceptions about The Campsite:

• It was originally thought that the game rolled campsite visitors on personality first than villager, but this has been debunked and is wrong.
• The 60% chance that the campsite only selects missing personalities is incorrect, although the actual system operates very similarly to this which justifies why this myth may have been there. The “Each Personality has its Own Cycle” theory is wrong.
• Yes, random campers can be used to kick out specific villagers. This method involves save-scumming (quitting without saving). See how to do it here. 

Campsite Basics:

Q: Someone told me if I have more stars on my rating I have a higher likelihood of getting a visitor. Is that true?

A: No. T’is but a myth, an old wives folktale!

Q: Ok… so how commonly do visitors spawn in the campsite?

A: After a visitor has been to your campsite, the first two days after that visitor will have a 0% spawn rate of campers. After that, it will follow this order (taken directly from ACNH Companion Book):

1-2 Days After: 0%

3 Days After: 5% likelihood

4 Days After: 10% likelihood

5 Days After: 15% likelihood

6+ Days After: 20% likelihood (MAX)

This means, every single individual day after 6 days from the last visitor will all each have a 20% chance of spawning a villager, the fact that the day 10 didn’t spawn a villager would not impact day 11’s ability to spawn a villager.

Q: I tried inviting a villager using Amiibo, and they're saying that they're "in the middle of a move"?

A: They're in your move-in queue. Scroll down to the bottom of this document for more information about it.

Q: My campsite visitor keeps refusing to move in!

A: Campsite visitors can never not move in. Keep talking to them and they’ll eventually agree. Losing a card game will not lock you out. Also, you cannot get a campsite visitor to move in if your gates are open or you have 9 or less villagers and no open plot.

Every time you tell a campsite villager to “move in,” there is a:

• 45% chance they’ll instantly reject
• 45% chance they’ll challenge you to a card game
• 10% chance they’ll instantly accept

There is a 50% chance a card game will require you to guess the suit (25% chance), and a 50% chance a card game will require you to guess the color (50% chance).

This will roll every time you click that “come to my island” button, meaning if they reject a move-in request, keep talking to them and you’ll get the opportunity again.

Q: My campsite visitor asked to replace someone I like! How can I select who my campsite visitor will kick out?

A: Hopefully you didn’t finish the conversation; as it autosaves that choice as soon as that conversation closes. Please refer to Step 7 in the DrJays method posted further down in this guide for more info on how to “select” who your campsite villager will replace. Knowing this is crucial if you want to kick out a specific villager using a random camper.

Q: I’ve been to x date and had a campsite person I didn’t invite. Can I go back and see them again?

A: No. Once you leave that date, that campsite villager will disappear. In fact previously there was evidence that campsite villagers would NEVER spawn on dates that you had been to previously before; however in version 1.2.0 this was removed (confirmed).

Q: Are spawn rates different for campsite visitors than for mystery island villagers? Warning: Math

A: Yes. (In fact Twiter user @Castaform has even made a Calculator of campsite and mystery island villagers you can access here!) Mystery island visitors spawn semi-randomly, it is currently believed that the game first randomly selects a species for the mystery island resident as shown here (thanks ctar17#3628 and now confirmed via data mining by Ninji#1624), and there are 35 species. This means you have a 1/35 shot of encountering any one species on a trip. After this, the actual villager selected from that species will be randomly selected from that species.

That is to say the odds of getting Raymond on an island are

1/35 * 1/23 (#of cats) = .124%, or effectively 1/8th of 1 percent. In fact, it would take 2400 island visits each in order for 95% of players to have encountered Raymond (1-(1-.00125)^2400)=.95

In contrast, there are only 3 octopi, thus my odds of getting Marina on an island would be:

1/35 * 1/3 (#of octopi) = about 1%, or 8x the likelihood of seeing Raymond on an island. This means it would take 300 island visits each in order for 95% of players to have encountered Marina. (1-(1-.01)^300)=.95

           
(Thank-you MegaNiko17#1809 for cleaning up my math here!)

Campsite Visitor Selection Mechanics:

Let’s compare that to campsite visitors. Campsite villagers normally spawn completely randomly (the game picks the campsite visitor outright) but the following point stands: The game has a 50% chance of only picking (pooling) from villagers of personality types you are missing. Otherwise, it will pool from all villagers. We can abuse this fact in order to help us spawn the specific villager we want!

A more detailed version can be found below:

Exclusion list: an array of all your villagers associated with a true/false value of if they have been encountered or have lived on your island before. Dub it the “visited/lived on your island log.”

How the campsite selection actually works

A more precise explanation

What is the move-in queue?

APPLICATION

Let’s say that my island is represented by all personalities except for a smug because I am hunting for Raymond. The first campsite visitor I have after that would have roughly the following likelihood of being Raymond:

Below equation assumes I have all personalities but smug, have only kicked out my first smug villager from the campsite, have 10 villagers, and have kicked out no one else.

 chance of encountering Raymond as a subsequent camper with the above conditions...

or roughly 14x better odds of getting Raymond in specific ON MY FIRST ATTEMPT than if I tried via mystery islands.

In the above equation, I accounted whether the game chooses from all personalities or if the game chooses from missing personalities. These both have a 50% chance of occurring. There are 393 villagers in animal crossing. Because we assume we have 10 villagers and have kicked out 1 smug villager, the total amount of villagers of all personalities that can be pooled is at 393-11 = 382, and the total amount of smug villagers that can be pooled is 34-1=33 (as former residents are excluded from the campsite with some exceptions - the cycle rerolling).

Furthermore, the game seems to try its best to avoid any repeats along this list until all have been seen. This means that whatever villager I saw first in my smug hunt would almost certainly not be repeated until I have seen all other smugs first. So that means that my next attempt would now be slightly more likely to get that specific villager, thus I would EVENTUALLY run into that villager, and my odds of getting that villager only increase as I keep repeating this process.**

**Unless the move-in queue hits

Q: If I have 3+ of the same personality, does that mean I have a super low chance of seeing that personality?

A: No. It’s the same as if you just had 1 of that personality.

Q: Okay perfect! I want to use this info to get X villager on my campsite! How can I do that?!

A: It’s gonna be a bit tedious. The method presented here is one such way to do this method known as campsite cycling or campsite rolling:

Q: Has anyone not been able to succeed with this method?

A: Thus far we are estimating about 99% have been successful with this method across thousands of people, if you feel you may be in the 1% please refer here. In short, issues can arise for those who have already had Raymond (or whatever target villager you’re hunting) before on their island, or who may have missed campsite visitors while time-traveling previously. This is not to say that they did not find success; but it required a lot more grinding than the standard method calls for.

Q: So, is there anything bad or risky about doing this method?

A: Previously it was shown that once you had visited a date; you could no longer receive a campsite visitor on that date ever again. Further, it was shown that spawn rates for all periods between these campsite visitors were severely decreased. HOWEVER, with the newest Redd & Leif patch, this seems to have changed, and now the only date saved for campsite villagers is the date of the most recent one you found! This means one of the previously biggest risks can now more or less be completely ignored.

However it is worth noting, your friends will see every single time you start the game if you play online. So if you don’t want to spam them with “DrJays is online!” every 5 minutes, we recommend putting your system on airplane mode or hide your online status. Also, expect to get a crapton of mail and message board notifications that you will have to clear out, roaches in your house, and of course plenty of weeds. Also, you should probably cage your flowers in; lest they will breed and run havoc.

Q: I don’t want to see spoilers of other seasons! What can I do?!

A: While I don’t necessarily recommend it unless you FULLY want to avoid spoilers, you could choose to work in a specific 2 month span, say from March 1st to April 30th 2020. Once you reach April 30th, you would simply reset to March 1st and you should see no problems with spawning campsite villagers. However, I do want to emphasize this method is much less tested and could give rise to problems with repeats, however I do genuinely think that it should work and give us the same results. EDIT 5/8:This has been further tested and shown to reliably work if you want to use it!

Q: Will my villagers leave while I’m time-traveling so much?!?!

A: Villagers will not leave without your direct consent no matter how far in the future you go. In fact, the villager leave mechanics have been debunked through datamining.

Q: Jesus, how long does that take?

A: In-game, it can take anywhere from .5-3 years. In real life, it can take anywhere from 1-2 days of full on grinding depending on your luck. However, I spent most of this time watching Netflix since it doesn’t require much attention outside of changing the date and checking the announcements, a lot of the “downtime” will be loading screens.  In terms of campsite visitors, here is my actual example: It took me 51 campsite visitors, 27 of which were smugs, before I finally hit Raymond, approximately 1.5 years into the future of my latest time travel. Despite this being pretty bad RNG; it still saved me loads of time and NMTs. Others have even reported finding Raymond WITHIN TWO HOURS of using this method! (However, that is pretty lucky and shouldn’t always be expected!)

Q: Okay but why would I do all of that when I can just mystery island hunt or trade them online?

A: Well, first off, as mentioned before some villagers have absurdly low mystery island spawn rates because they are part of a species with a lot of members (cats and rabbits). So a forced campsite spawn can be a lot less attempts than mystery island hunting. Further, unless you have an abundance of NMTs, the odds of getting one of these rare villagers either through island hunting or trade can be insane, especially for a guy like Raymond who sells for nearly 1500 NMTs. If you are not rich in NMTs, this is a completely free way to potentially land Raymond.

Q: If I have all the personalities and don’t want to get rid of one, can I still use this method?

A: Kinda. You’re not going to have the boosted chances (50% pools missing personality only, 50% pools all) of getting a specific personality working for you anymore, meaning you won’t be able to target specific personalities easily. You could still work through the chaos of seeing ALL the personalities with no booster, but it’s going to be an absurdly difficult grind if you’re looking for a specific villager. I’m talking 200-400+ campsite reloads and potentially a week’s worth of work. Further you actually CAN get repeats in the larger pool (shoutout ChibiPeen#9331 for an absurd amount of work to confirm this). Unless you have no NMT, I do not recommend this.

Q: If I have more than 1 missing personality, what happens?

A: If the campsite decides to pool villagers from missing personalities only, all villagers from all missing personalities will be pooled and one of them will randomly be selected, subtracting any excluded villagers from appearing in the campsite.

Q: Do I need a free plot in order for a camper to be able to move in?

A: IF you have 9 villagers or less, you NEED an open plot. If you have 10 villagers, the only way for them to move in is to replace someone.

Q: If I have someone in boxes already/has a moving-out thought bubble and invite a campsite villager, will they replace that person?

A: Campsite visitors are excluded from replacing villagers scheduled to move house locations and in boxes.

Q: If I see someone during the DrJays process that I want to keep that isn’t my target, will it mess it up if I invite them?

A: Only if they’re the personality that you’re hunting; if you invite a smug while hunting a smug, then you no longer have the missing personality booster working for you. Otherwise it will have no impact on your cycling, so invite any others you see that you like!

Q: Is there a trick to winning the card game?

A: You have a flat out 25% chance of winning a 4-suit card game and a 50% chance of winning a 2- “color guess” card game. There is no way to manipulate this.

Q: I’m going day-by-day using the method above, but I haven’t had a visitor in X days! Is this just bad luck or is my campsite broken?!

A: Maybe? Bad RNG does exist, but we need to be careful not to conflate the relatively low spawn rates of campsite visitors with a “broken” campsite. If we do the 6 day skip mentioned above, each day will only have a 20% chance of having a visitor. That means the expected average amount of days before we get a campsite visitor is going to be 5 attempts after starting with the +6 day routine above, or finding a villager every 11 days according to the actual in-game calendar. But this also means we could easily go above this as well, and end up having to wait 20 days to find someone.

When should you worry? This method should give us a 1% chance of having no villagers after 21 consecutive attempts; if you’re still unable to get a campsite visitor at that point, try changing the time period you’re using (ex: instead of 2021 try 2022)

Q: How does this whole cycling thing work? What’s the science/data behind no repeats?

Note: this has yet to be verified.

A: [Shoutout The_Yellow_Orange#3286 for his helping me uncover this] From what we can tell through limited experimentation, the game saves data on every single villager that you’ve encountered on previous campsite visits (OR Amiibo campsite visitors), or that have previously lived on your island before (whether a default villager, campsite move-in, random move-in, adopted online, or a mystery island invited move-in). From here, the game creates a list of individuals for every villager that you have not “encountered” on your island (encounters on friend’s islands or uninvited mystery island tours do not count towards this). Every time the campsite loads, it will randomly select someone from the available list of “non-encountered” villagers for whatever personality has been rolled for that day. If, via campsite rolling, you manage to actually progress through the entire list of representatives for a specific personality, the game will completely reset that list and now all characters in that personality will have a potential chance of being selected.

5/27/20: Updated series of events theory:

1. Game will initially roll for whether you have a campsite visitor: (n-2)*5 percent likelihood, where n is the days since the last campsite visitor, where n must equal at least 3, and the value caps at 20% at n=6+.
2. If the camper roll is successful, if you are missing personalities on your island the game now rolls to see if it will prioritize a missing personality. This roll has a 50% chance of deciding to automatically pick a villager from the missing personality.

1. If missing personality roll lands, it will randomly select a villager from the total subset of all villagers in missing personality groups; villagers previously encountered on your island are not included in this subset.

1. If all villagers in missing personalities have been encountered, it will select a random villager from the total subset of all villagers in missing personality types.

3. If the camper roll is successful but missing personality not selected (50%), or there are no missing personalities on the island, it will now roll randomly from all non island-encountered villagers (INCLUDING missing personalities).

1. If all villagers in the above pool have already been encountered on the island, the game will randomly select a visitor from all possible villagers (1/387 odds for each villager when considering 10 must be on your island currently).

4. Note: Encountered villagers include any villagers who have lived on your island, or who have spawned in your campsite via normal means or amiibo; regardless of whether you talked to them or actually saw them on your island in-person.

The combined values of these two rolls is how we get a value for missing personality close to 60%, in fact experimental data suggested it should be 58.5% (via mostly Raymond hunting); and if we calculate our expected values when searching for a smug we would get 50% + (33/387) = 58.527%, or roughly our experimental 58.5%! Values are sourced from dodotracker.com

6/7/2020: Ninji has confirmed the above theorized events!

Q: On the topic of further ways to use this method…(Amiibos and random move-ins)

A: Considering the full theory listed above and what we already know; it seems very possible we can utilize the same information in some other ways as well. We seem to be able to use Amiibos as a ways of crossing villagers off our list as well; meaning if we go through all 33 available smug amiibo’s in our campsite, our 34th smug visitor WILL be Raymond [Confirmed by /u/Vylandia on Reddit]. During this process, all you have to do is day-by-day load in each Amiibo, you can just save and turn off the game once they’re invited, no need to go talk to them [Confirmed by GPaShadowz#4747]. Repeat this until you’ve gone through all the villagers of a specific personality, and now refer back to the DrJays method to spawn a campsite villager; the next smug you see WILL be Raymond assuming all other conditions are met from the guide. Alternatively, we can make use of the fact that if you allow him, Nook will ALWAYS fill empty plots on his own with the missing personality type provided you have no one in your move-in queue. Thus we could effectively work through our list this way using similar personality setup methods! Also, make sure you are only missing the personality you want otherwise this will not work.

Q: Uh, the house exterior of my new villager is… not the one it should have… wtf?

A: (THIS HAS BEEN PATCHED IN 1.3.0 although it didn’t fix anyone who was affected prior) Jeez, did you skip over step 9? I bolded AND underlined it, dude. Immediately after you invite a villager from the campsite, they will kick the person they selected into boxes. If you skip the day after this villager is in boxes (and thus the day where your new resident would have a “Sold!” sign on an empty plot of land), the game can actually glitch and keep the previous resident’s house exterior. At this moment, the only way to correct this glitch is to move the villager to another island, and then move them back with the help of someone online; it is unknown whether this will be patched or whether glitched exterior residents could be deleted in future patches. Please note, in a small amount of cases, this can occur even when you do everything right; and it is unknown what may trigger it in these specific cases.

Q: Can I use these same methods/philosophy even if I don’t time travel?

A: Well, yes. But it might take a long amount of irl days to pull it off just because campsite spawning is already a fairly difficult thing EVEN without time travel.  

Q: I nearly completed the cycle of my missing personality, but now I’m suddenly seeing repeats! What happened?

A: Move-in queue.

Q: Why is this guide so long?
A: People ask alot of questions. I’d rather provide too much info than not enough P:

Q: Won’t this guide tank Raymond’s value?

A: It’s my evil master plan to do exactly this actually. Down with inflation >:(

Information about the move-in queue:

• The move-in queue (abbreviated miq, named “MoveInAnimal” in the game files) is an array that can hold up to four villagers, that are villagers obtained from other player’s voids.
• Villagers have a chance of transferring from other player’s voids (array of villagers they’ve kicked out without having another player adopt, referred to as “MoveOutAnimal” in the game files) to your move in queue if you visit them.
• If you have a villager in your MIQ, they will move in if you have an unfilled plot and move past 5AM once without filling it. This is different from the natural “Tom Nook” move-in process and villagers who move in via the MIQ will state that they moved from another player’s island, in the same manner if they have been directly adopted from another island.
• Villagers in your MIQ can’t appear in your campsite and mystery island tours. Scanning their amiibo will not work.