Starting a town: the train, Nook's jobs, and your first save
The opening of Animal Crossing runs a long way before it lets you save, and it does not tell you where that point is. This is the whole sequence in order, and the exact thing that unlocks saving.
The first thing the game ever says to you.
The short version
You can save as soon as you have talked to one villager. Not when Nook lets you go, and not when he walks off. One conversation with anybody, and the gyroid outside your door will offer to save.
1. The train, with Rover
Rover asks a handful of things, and they are not all doing the same job. Some set real values, and three of them quietly pick your face.
The clock question, and the only one whose answer you can check against something outside the game. The date it shows is your real one.
The ones that set something:
- Whether the clock is right. Say no and he opens a clock-setting screen.
- Your name, up to eight characters. He then guesses your gender from it, and answering "that's not right" sends you back to re-enter the name.
- Your gender, from confirming or denying his guess.
- The town name, also up to eight characters.
The three that pick your face, plus one that decides whether they count:
- "Mind if I sit here?"
- "Why are you going there?"
- "Where will you live?"
- And near the end, the one about whether you have any money. That one is the switch: answer it the wrong way and the other three are thrown away and your face is picked at random instead.
Because your face is worked out at the very end of the train ride, changing your gender partway through changes your face too, even with identical answers. The face guide has the full table.
2. Arriving, and picking a house
Porter meets you at the station and says one line. He does not carry your luggage or walk you anywhere; that is a New Leaf memory. Walk out and Tom Nook picks you up.
He shows you four houses, one in each corner of the plot, and you are sealed into that acre until you buy one. Walk into each and back out, and the one that is free gets you the offer.
The four houses differ only in wallpaper, flooring and roof colour. Their interiors are otherwise identical: every one starts with a tape deck, a cardboard box and a diary. Nothing about them is randomised. What is randomised when the town is made is the land itself, your town's native fruit, the station design, which six villagers move in, and your starting shirt.
You buy it by handing over the 1,000 bells in your pocket. That money is flagged so you cannot spend it on anything else, which is the game's way of making sure the down payment happens.
3. Nook's part-time job
Eight chores in a fixed order, plus one that only appears if you have not already met the town. You cannot turn any of them down, and none of them expire.
| # | Chore |
|---|---|
| 1 | Change into the uniform Take it off and the chore comes back. |
| 2 | Plant the flowers and saplings Seven flower bags and three saplings. Done when no plant is left in your pockets. |
| 3 | Introduce yourself around town The conditional one. Skipped entirely if you have already met every villager and spoken to Tortimer. |
| 4 | Deliver a piece of furniture Finishing this is what gets you the town map. |
| 5 | Write and post a letter Nook hands you the stationery. |
| 6 | Do a favour for a villager Any villager, any favour. |
| 7 | Deliver a carpet A different villager from the furniture one. |
| 8 | Deliver an axe It goes to the same villager you wrote to, and they read your letter back to you. |
| 9 | Post a notice on the bulletin board The last one. |
If your pockets are too full Nook holds the chore back rather than giving it to you, and the flower one needs ten free slots. Take the uniform off and he tells you off, once. If the villager a delivery was meant for moves out, he takes the item back and picks someone else.
The town behaves differently while you work
Several systems are held back until the job is over, which is why the first hour feels quiet:
- It cannot rain. Day one is never wet.
- The train does not run.
- Nook's shop never closes, whatever the hour.
- The post office does not deliver, and Pete does not fly in.
- You have no map until the fourth chore is done.
- Your first ten villager conversations are tutorial lines, not normal chat.
4. Being let go
Post the notice, talk to Nook once more, and he gives his closing speech and walks you out of the shop. Stepping through the door plays a small fanfare.
You keep the uniform. It is handed over as an ordinary shirt rather than a job item, and nothing takes it back. You also keep the town map, and all 17,400 bells of debt, which the job never reduces.
The day after, the shop has a new conversation waiting: Nook wants to talk about your house.
5. The first save, and who is wrong about it
The gyroid outside your house is the save point. Early on it will not offer to save at all, and it does not explain why.
It refuses only while all three of these are true at once:
- You have never saved from this house before.
- Nook's part-time job is still running.
- Not one villager has met you.
So the lock lifts the moment any one of them stops being true, and in practice the third goes first. Say hello to a single villager and you can save immediately, long before the chores are finished. Once you have saved once from that house, the check can never fire again.
This is worth spelling out because the two most-linked sources disagree and both are wrong. One long-standing guide says you can save the moment Nook walks off, which fails because at that point nobody has met you. Players on forums who hit the refusal concluded you must finish every chore, which fails because they never tried talking to somebody first.