Animal Crossing New Horizons amiibo support: How to use amiibo, unlocks and Photopia explained
Everything you need to know about amiibo support in New Horizons.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons offers you the chance to dust off your Animal Crossing amiibo collection.
Each Animal Crossing amiibo will help you build your dream island by giving you the chance to unlock something - or someone - special.
This guide will also tell you how and where you can use amiibo in New Horizons, including the new location, Photopia.
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If you want to learn more Animal Crossing: New Horizons, then check out are guides on autosaving and multiplayer.
Supported amiibo available in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Animal Crossing: New Horizons supports three different types of amiibo, but not every single Animal Crossing amiibo, such as DJ KK, will be supported on the game's release date. Instead, support for these additional characters will be introduced at a later date.
The first type of amiibo New Horizons supports are the Animal Crossing amiibo figurines.
In total 18 Animal Crossing amiibos have been released so far; two of these, Villager and the first Isabelle amiibo, were released for Super Smash Bros., while the other 16, including Tom Nook, Kapp'n and Rover, are dedicated to the Animal Crossing games.
The second type of amiibo New Horizons supports are the Animal Crossing amiibo cards.
Spanning four series, there are 400 Animal Crossing amiibo cards in total. These cards range from the animal villagers who live in your town, such as Bob and Fang, to special visitors, like Redd and Gulliver.
Five promo Animal Crossing amiibo cards have also been released. You can find a full catalogue of the Animal Crossing amiibo cards, from all four series, on the Animal Crossing website.
Finally, New Horizons also supports the Animal Crossing: New Leaf - Welcome amiibo series. This is a one-off set of 50 amiibo cards, which were released alongside the amiibo support update for Animal Crossing: New Leaf.
These cards reintroduced 50 villagers who had been absent from the series since Animal Crossing and Animal Crossing e+, such as Stella, Tybalt and Boots.
A special set of six cards for this series was also released as a promotion with Sanrio.
A full catalogue for the Animal Crossing: New Leaf - Welcome amiibo series is available on the official Animal Crossing website.
If you need helping looking for a specific amiibo, then Jelly Deals has a guide on where to buy all the Animal Crossing amiibo and amiibo cards.
How and where to use amiibo in Animal Crossing: New Horizons explained
To use an amiibo in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you need to head to Resident Services once the Town Hall has been unlocked.
There you'll find an ATM like machine with a green leaf on its side - this will allow you to use your amiibo.
Simply interact with the machine and then place your chosen amiibo or amiibo card on the NFC touchpoint on your controller.
If you're using a Joy-Con controller or Nintendo Switch Lite, then the NFC touchpoint is located on the right controller stick. If you're using a Pro Controller, however, then the NFC touchpoint is the Nintendo Switch logo in the top-center of the controller.
Resident Services will be open from the very beginning of New Horizons and is available 24 hours a day, which means you'll always have access to the amiibo ATM.
The Animal Crossing 2.0 update and Happy Home Paradise is here! We can help you with the new additions - including where to find Brewster, Gyroids, new villagers, ordinances, new fences, storage shed, new hairstyles, Froggy Chair, group stretching and Kapp'n boat tours. Cooking is now unlockable, so you need to know how to make both flour and sugar, as well as how to grow carrots, potatoes and tomatoes. Meanwhile, if you're new to Animal Crossing, our New Horizons tips can help with the basics. From the off, there's fish and bugs to catch, flowers and fruit to grow with. One long term goal is building your Happy Home Academy score. Finally, you need tools such as the new ladder and vaulting pole to fully explore.
What amiibo unlock in Animal Crossing: New Horizons explained
Currently, we're aware of two features that involve amiibo in Animal Crossing: New Horizons:
- Invite villagers to your island
- Photopia
Inviting villagers to your island
One of the main functions of the amiibo cards in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is to invite villagers to visit your island.
To do this you need to construct the campground on this island. Once you have this location, you'll be able to use the Animal Crossing amiibo cards to invite that specific villager to your island.
This villager will then appear in the tent on the campground where you'll be able to interact with them.
The Animal Crossing Nintendo Direct also highly suggests that you'll be able to encourage these visiting villagers to stay on your island and, possibly, become permanent residents.
Photopia
Photopia is a special island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons where you can use models of the various villagers to create photoshoots. These models are unlocked by using either amiibo figurines or cards in Photopia.
Once unlocked, you can dress these models in a variety of clothing, assign them emotions to express, decorate the scene with props and pick out the camera direction before taking your photo.
Since you won't be able to use every single amiibo card, such as DJ KK, in New Horizons straight away, we can't say for sure if there are more special features that will be unlocked by using any form of Animal Crossing amiibo.
It's possible that you could unlock special items, like in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, or special guests, like DJ KK, by using specific amiibos. We'll just have to wait and see what lies in store for New Horizons and its continued amiibo support.