In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, some friends aren’t worth making. Maybe you’re tired of somebody’s nonsense, you’ve got a new buddy you’d rather be neighbors with, or you really lost the opening draw and ended up with Rodney or Pietro on your island. Here’s how to serve your least-favorite people an eviction notice in New Horizons.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons – How to Kick Villagers Out

We’ve talked about how to make friends in New Horizons before, which necessarily involves knowing what not to do. However, we didn’t talk specifically about what to do when you’re deliberately trying to get villagers to leave.

Because New Horizons’s friendship systems are mostly invisible, there’s a lot of cargo-culting that’s been built around them. You can express your displeasure with a villager on your island in a lot of ways, such as telling Isabelle about their jerkiness on the daily, but those don’t actually appear to have any mechanical effect. The only real way to convince a villager they’re unwelcome here on Your Name Here Island is, just as in real life, rampant asshattery.

Upon first appearing in New Horizons, a villager has an under-the-hood “friendship score” of 25 points with you. To get them to go away, your goal is to lower that score to 0, at which point they’ll tell you that they’re thinking about leaving. Encourage them to do so (“Maybe it’s time”), and that villager is gone for good. While you’re working on tanking a villager’s opinion of you, make sure to not do anything that would accidentally improve that score. Simply talking to them is worth +1 point once a day; giving them gifts that they actually want is worth 1 to 3. If a villager has fleas and you walk up to beat them with your bug net, you’ll catch the fleas and get +5 points for doing them a solid.

The single easiest way to truly annoy a villager in New Horizons is to ruin their birthday. If you give them a “present” of weeds, garbage, or spoiled turnips on their birthday, you’ll lose up to 5 friendship points at once. Just giving them the gift of garbage under ordinary circumstances is only worth a loss of 2 points. You can also shove them around or pummel them with your bug net until they get upset, then refuse to apologize afterward. That will lose you 3 points.

Yeah, it doesn’t exactly feel great to act like this to a stuffed animal, but it’s your island. You don’t have to put up with clowns, jerks, or whatever the hell Coco is supposed to be, and that might mean making some hard choices.

New Horizons is one of the biggest games of the year, and we’re breaking it down bit by bit every day here at Prima. Check out our game hub for more tricks and tips, including:

• New Horizons also hosts the best Billie Eilish tribute of the year
• Here’s why people are paying actual money for villagers like Raymond
• Hey, let’s use time travel to shake Redd down for his entire art collection!

Seriously, Animal Crossing: New Horizons fans, one of you has to know. What is Coco? A gingerbread bunny who’s seen too much? A cigarette burn brought to life by an angry sorcerer? One of those forest spirits from Princess Mononoke after too much time in a tanning bed? What kind of nightmare brought to life is she? Tell me, seriously, via our official Twitter @PrimaGames.