Animal Crossing: New Horizons
I’ve been buying Turnips in Animal Crossing: New Horizons since I started playing it more than 50 days ago, but I’ve only been fully using algorithmic tools to predict their prices a few weeks, both because I need as many bells as I can get and because they’re fascinating. Today, I had the idea that I was going to back off a little bit and not buy quite so many turnips as I did last week. Then, I thought to myself—what if I bought way more? Such is the stalk market.
When it comes to price prediction, I’ve focused my energy on Turnip Calculator and Turnip Prophet: I’ve seen some more out there, but you can only use so many. Turnip Calculator seems to be the more popular one, likely owing to its SEO-friendly name and slick presentation. But while Turnip Calculator does a fine job, I’m now leaning towards Turnip Prophet for one very simple reason.
Turnip Prophet
Unlike Turnip Calculator, Turnip Prophet has a field at the top where you can indicate your last week’s price pattern, if you know it. You need a full week of prices before you can know that information for certain, but once you have that it becomes much more accurate. Both Turnip Prophet and Calculator were able to give me some idea that my prices “could” spike later in the week, but Turnip Prohet was able to much more quickly identify the “small spike” pattern and give me a better idea of when it would spike, and how high.
A note: the image above was from Tuesday PM, when it was still predicting the likelihood of a large spike pattern. It was wrong about that, but adjusted to a very accurate small spike at Wednesday AM.
I was pretty impressed not only by what a small range of prices Turnip Prophet was able to offer, but also how accurate they were: I didn’t get great prices this week, but they were right in line with what the tool gave me. Turnip Prophet also has a giant spreadsheet giving you the probabilities of various different price patterns, which you can go pretty deep into even early in the week before you have a ton of data.
So using either of these things will give you some information about what to expect from your Turnip Prices. But so long as you have the previous week’s turnip data, I found that Turnip Prophet delivered more accurate results.
