While I'm absolutely in LOVE with Animal Crossing: City Folk, there's one thing about the game that irks both Spec and I to no end: Animal Tracks. Sheep Trails. Dirt Paths. Whatever you want to call them they're a pain in the rear and a huge source of frustration when you're trying to preserve the grass and maintain your town.
For those of you not playing AC:CF, basically what's happening is that any routes that are consistently taken in your town eventually wear down into dirt paths. This sounds like a neat way to make your town unique and offer a bit of complexity to the game, but the problem is that so much of your gameplay takes place on the grass or snow. If you want to pull weeds, water wilting flowers, pick fruit, go bug hunting, go fishing, plant trees, shake trees, find special visiting characters, roll snowballs, or shoot down gift balloons, you're going to have to go on the grass/snow.
What ends up happening is that within a few days, your grass (or at this time of year, snow) starts disappearing. The only way that it will grow back is if you don't walk on it at all for a long period of time, which then of course means that you can't really USE that tract of land. If you decide to cast your cares to the wind and just take care of your town, you end up with brown desert villages. It's not attractive at all, and it also can cramp your gameplay as some bugs only appear on grass, and you won't be able to roll snowballs or make the Snowman in the winter.
While the dirt paths are a feature that offers some dynamics to the game, it seems to be tuned too sensitively. It should take weeks for a path to run down, not days, and it should be only if there's consistent running over that same path day after day. At this point there's a few things that we can do to try to help the situation:
1. Lay down sidewalks! I've made sidewalks to use as paths, making circuits around each of my housing hubs (I seem to have houses in two clusters in my town) and to each shop/landmark. This helps us to use the same path every time we run from the beach to Nooks, or from our house to the gates. It's been a big help so far, but we're still beginning to show signs of wear in the snowy parts of town and along the banks of our river.
Helpful Hint: For a sidewalk, create a design suitable for a sidewalk in your design editor. Then go to where you want to create a path, click on the design, and select "Display on Ground".
2. Walk, don't jog or run when maintaining your town. While this doesn't stop the wear completely, it slows it down greatly.
3. Plant as many flowers and trees as possible in your town.
4. Sign the Animal Tracks Petition. Kuro Tori has started an online petition to Nintendo to patch in a change to the Animal Tracks. It could be making the feature optional, tuning the sensitivity, or removing it completely. It will take hundreds of signatures to catch the attention of Nintendo, so every signature counts! You can find it at
http://www.petitiononline.com/grasswoe/petition.html. Be sure to leave a (polite but firm) comment on the petition as well!
5. Email Nintendo with your feedback on the Animal Tracks feature. Be sure to mention that it's for Animal Crossing: City Folk so that there's no confusion on which of their many games you're commenting on. Their email form can be found
here.
Last night Chris 2 from Townburg stopped by and furnished me with the last fruit I needed... PEARS! YES! I was super-psyched to have Chris 2 over since Townburg is another town with a blog. Chris 2 had an unfortunate run-in with our resident snooty, Eloise (the old hag). Afterwards I went over to Townburg to meet their residents. There was a meteor shower going on, the first one I've ever seen in AC! I also picked up a super-cool pattern that Lizz created, and it just so happens to be my favorite colors, pink and green!
I think the overall visit was good luck because later that night I caught not one, but TWO stringfish!
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