How to use Animal Crossing New Horizons amiibo and what they unlock

Animal Crossing New Horizons amiibo and amiibo cards can be incredibly useful for your island life. If you're sitting on a wealth of Animal Crossing-themed amiibo, or even Zelda-themed amiibo, you're in luck, because there are three main ways they are supported in Animal Crossing New Horizons - though it's worth mentioning that you can also use them in the Happy Home Paradise DLC too. Not only are they a cute way to get mileage out of your no doubt vast collections of NFC critters, but it could also help you progress in the game. Here's how Animal Crossing New Horizons amiibo functionality works.

Campsite and amiibo visitors

The main way to use amiibos in Animal Crossing New Horizons is through the campsite, which you'll add to your island by talking to Tom Nook once Resident Services upgrades from a tent to a building.

Once the campsite is built, you can use the Nook Stop machine in Resident Services to invite villagers to visit the campsite using your amiibo and amiibo cards. You can even use Zelda-themed amiibos to invite Animal Crossing Zelda villagers, Mineru and Tulin, to your island and unlock Animal Crossing Zelda items in the Nook Shopping section of the Nook Stop.

Otherwise, you can't invite special characters like Resetti or Digby to camp out, and Isabelle is locked to Resident Services so she can't either. But you can ask any regular villager to pay you a visit, which is where amiibo cards come in particularly handy.

Once a character has arrived at your campsite, you can head over and talk to them. They will usually ask you to craft a souvenir using an Animal Crossing New Horizons DIY recipe for them to take home, and doing this gets you closer to unlocking the option to ask them to move to your island permanently. You will have to invite them to the campsite several times before they consider making the move - and you can only invite one character to the campsite per calendar day - but it's worth pursuing if there's a particular character you want on your island.

This is currently the only way to cherry-pick the characters that move to your island. Otherwise Animal Crossing New Horizons villagers will arrive at random to the campsite, or will lurk on the islands you can visit using Nook Miles Tickets.

Harv's Island and the amiibo photoshoots

You can also use your Animal Crossing amiibo collection with the help of Harvey the hippy-looking dog - or Harv to his friends, of which there are few. You'll find him loitering around the Resident Services tent in the early days of island life and will tell you that you can visit his island - handily named Harv's Island - whenever you want. Just head over to the airport and you can ask to visit Harv's Island.

It's here that you discover Harv's Island is actually called Photopia and Harv is a photographer with his own photography studio here on the island. Head inside the building and you can use your amiibo and amiibo cards to summon rather strange lifeless versions of characters to pose for photoshoots.

It's quite limited, but if you want to have a little fun with old favorites, it's easy to do and travelling to and from Harv's Island is free - it won't cost bells or Nook Miles. Plus, from the next calendar day, you'll unlock a purchasable poster version of anyone you invite to Photopia in in the 'Special Goods' section of Nook Shopping from the Nook Stop terminal, which you can then hang on the wall of your home.

The Roost and inviting villagers for coffee

If you've upgraded and filled your Animal Crossing New Horizons museum quite considerably, you can unlock The Roost cafe. On the far-left side of the cafe, you can spot a yellow amiibo phone attached to the wall which you can use to invite villagers and special characters to the cafe for a coffee provided you have the right amiibo or card. They might even bring friends or family along for a group outing.

If you've upgraded Resident Services, you can also start thinking about upping your Animal Crossing New Horizons island rating to unlock other features for your island, such as the Animal Crossing New Horizons Hotel. But if you've got an amiibo villager living on your island running amok, you'll likely also want to know how to evict a resident in Animal Crossing New Horizons.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.