Animal Crossing: City Folk and Let's Go To the City HRA Guide
By Ginger

Wow! Can you believe I actually get to write TWO articles? My feng shui must REALLY be working to get this lucky! :D You've probably heard of the Happy Room Academy which is now operating in the city and run by Lyle, ex-insurance salesman. Granted, Lyle isn't real happy about working for the HRA, which is really sad but when nothing else cheers up old Lyle, a good HRA score does!

Basically when it comes to impressing Lyle and the unseen members of the HRA (you know, the ones who sneak into your house every Saturday night for their evaluation) there aren't a lot of things to know, and because the nature of Animal Crossing is to build up slowly you don't even need to learn them all at once, so you can start out simple and build up from there! First off, remember that every item that you put in your house either adds or subtracts from your HRA score. Items that ADD to the score are furniture, identified fossils, gyroids, seashells, most clothing, and accessories including balloons and pinwheels from Phineas. Items that detract from your score are: money, shopping cards, music, tools, seed bags, tree saplings, rolls of wallpaper and carpeting, stationery, medicine, key, bubble wands, knife & fork, candy of any type, fireworks, fruit, pitfall seeds, unidentified fossils, spaceship parts, empty lamp, turnips of any type, and garbage (the kind you catch while fishing). Inaccesible items also deduct points from your score. Dressers, wardrobes, chairs and sofas need to be accessible. If you can't open a dresser or wardrobe, or sit on a chair or sofa, it isn't accessible. Also, all dolls and figurines must be facing away from a wall. The point penalties aren't harsh, only one point per item is deducted. A few items, like the work uniform, clothing gifts from Jack (as well as the Jack-in-the-Box), and forged paintings have a neutral, or 0, base point value. Having said that, I'm not going to get into anything real technical here because I don't like wrapping my brain around a bunch of numbers and logistics other than to say each item has a base points value as well as added values for genre, series, theme, set, feng shui or being a lucky item. Understanding the concepts is way more valuable than understanding the numbers behind them. Feng shui: As described in my feng shui guide when it comes to the three feng shui colors (green, red, and yellow) there's a place for everything and everything should be in its place. Bonus HRA points are scored for each item placed within its proper feng shui area. Of course if you have too many items to place properly you won't receive any penalties so don't worry about that. Just TRY to put any item with feng shui in its appropriate place. Lucky Items: Each unique lucky item packs a bonus punch of 7,777 extra points ON TOP of any points it might be awarded for anything else, such as color (including feng shui), set, or genre bonus. (By unique I mean it wouldn't matter if you had ten treasure chests in your house, only one of those would get the 7,777 point bonus, not all ten. However, if you had a treasure chest, Triforce, raccoon figurine, washer/dryer, draceana, ivory piano, and lucky clover in your house, you would receive 54,439 from the lucky points alone.) Daily Necessities: Five items make up this group: a bed, dresser, wardrobe, table, and chair. They need not be from the same set or series or even be placed on the same floor for the Necessities bonus. Extra points are awarded, however, if they ARE from the same series. Points are only awarded for one group of Necessities. Sets: A furniture set is a small group of items that share a similarity, like the Lava Lamp Set or the Lucky Cat Set (see the Printable Catalog List to know exactly which items create valid sets). Each completed set is awarded a completed set bonus in addition to any possible color (including feng shui) or genre bonus. The larger the set, the more points will be awarded, but extra points won't be awarded for duplicate items. All pieces of the set need to be in the same room for the set bonus. Series: A furniture series is a grouping of 10 pieces of furniture (each of which include the "Necessities of Life" plus six other furniture pieces as well as their coordinating wallpaper and floor covering. Regular furniture series: The Cabana, Regal and Blue series are examples of the series that can be purchased from Tom Nook and Crazy Redd. Each of these series will contain at least one spotlight item and at least one Redd-only item. Items other than the Redd-only and spotlight items can be obtained through shooting down balloons and as gifts in letters from villagers. Any of the buyable series furniture, including wall and floor coverings, can be ordered from Tom Nook's catalog once your character has cataloged them. GracieGrace furniture series: These series (including their wall and floor coverings) are only available at GracieGrace and can never be ordered from Tom Nook's catalog. They will also never appear as gifts from villagers or in balloons. Special Event & Holiday furniture series: These series (including all furniture, wallpaper and floor coverings) are obtained through special holidays like the Harvest Festival, Jingle Event, Festivale, Bunny Day or Halloween, or performing certain deeds like building perfect snowmen in winter or from picking mushrooms in autumn. They can never be purchased from Nook's catalog and will never appear as gifts from villagers or be shot down in balloons. The ten pieces of furniture earn a completed series bonus, and adding the corresponding wall and floor coverings earn an extra bonus. All pieces of a series needs to be in a single room for these bonuses. Themes: Themes are usually comprised of decorative type objects and never contain the "Daily Necessities." Examples of themes are the Construction Theme, Nursery Theme, Mario Theme, and Pirate Theme. The number of the furniture pieces for each theme varies, and each has a coordinating wall and floor covering. With the exception of the Mario and Pirate Themes, the wall and floor coverings are only available from Saharah. All pieces of the Mario Theme originally come from balloon presents. Pascal will give pieces of the Pirate Theme in exchange for a scallop (not to be confused with the white scallop) to one character in your village per visit. The furniture pieces he gives can be ordered from Nook once cataloged, but the wallpaper and floor covering can never be ordered. Having both wall and floor of a theme, even without the furniture, is worth a good amount of points. Adding the coordinating of furniture to that wall and floor covering can greatly increase the score since points are calculated based on how many items are in the theme as well as having a completed theme. Color Bonus: Each item, whether it's furniture, fossils, gyroids, clothing, accessories or flowers is assigned two colors. In order to achieve a color bonus, a minimum of eight items total within the room, then the points are awarded based on percentage. I know, I know, I said no numbers, but this section needs just a few. With 70% of the furniture the same color, a bonus of 200 points per item will be calculated. If 90% of the furniture has the same color, a bonus of 600 points per item will be added. Only one color bonus is allowed per room, but each room can earn its own color bonus. Genre Bonus: Most furniture pieces fall into two genres, but there are some that have only one designation. The genres are Retro, Dignified, Trendy, and Playful, with either Retro, Trendy, or None being the first genre designation and Dignified, Playful or None as the second designation (ie: all gyroids are Retro/None, while all plants out of the Houseplants Set are None/Dignified). As such, furniture items can be Retro/Dignified, Trendy/Playful, Retro/Playful or Trendy/Dignified, and bonus HRA points are awarded for matching genres. As one might imagine, Retro and Trendy don't mesh, nor do Dignified and Playful. The genre bonuses work very similarly to the color bonuses, in that there needs to be at least eight items in the room to qualify for the genre bonus, with 70% earning a 100 point bonus per item and 90% earning a 300 point bonus per item. Unlike the color bonus, however, a single room can have two genre bonuses, and again, each room can earn its own genre bonuses. After all that explaining, I'd just like to add that it's my personal opinion that when it comes to putting furniture in our houses, before trying to knock the socks off the collective that is the HRA, proper placement of green, red and yellow feng shui items should be top priority. Fortunately, good feng shui and good HRA score don't have to be mutually exclusive, and since good feng shui has such a great impact on various aspects of Animal Crossing, it needs to take precedence.