Slack, Stalk, Shop, Stock. On the surface, none of these words seems to have common ground but you would be surprised how addictive the stalk market in Animal Crossing New Horizons has left people. So we came across some pretty creative posts the past few weeks about how turnip selling and trading has grown into a community.
Tom Riley for starters, an employee of Curve, a fintech startup is enjoying his work from home with a turnip forum on Slack. The same app is used for business conferences and work talk. It’s quite the irony. People talk about their sells and track data to extrapolate information. They try to make everyone rich!
Turnips and the stalk market might be the closest to gambling that New Horizon can be. Turnips are bought on Sunday and are sold in the following itself or they rot. There can be an up-price according to the algorithm placed in the game, giving you a chance to get a huge cash grab.
Players all around the world have a joint in an effort to beat the system and gain the most amount of money by selling turnips. People are throwing in all the bells they have to buy turnips and come out with a bucket-load.
It is funny. Tom Riley’s colleague created a slack bot to track the turnip price and see who made the most profit in the game. The channel currently has 34 users from their office.
“My work from home quarantine lifestyle now involves: wake up, reach for Switch, [which is] outside of [my] bed, get back into bed, check turnip prices, submit them to the bot,” Riley says. “It’s kind of addictive to see who’s going to get the best price of the day.”
Everyone puts in their island’s price and the bot pings the whole group if anyone’s island reaches above 200 bells. Then the whole group travels to the said island to gain the optimal profit. Gambling perfected.
Another quite interesting aspect that jumped up was what to do if your turnips rot? Polygon writer Nicole Carpenter writes this hilarious blog post on how her time-travelling shenanigans lead to her discovering the benefit of rotten turnips. I swear Animal Crossing New Horizons is a blessing in everyone’s life and we thank god (Nintendo) for it.
Stay Safe!
