Create Digital Passports To Invite Friends In ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’

Happy Animal Crossing: New Horizons day! While you’ve probably been itching to start the long, laborious process of paying off yet another digital mortgage and shaping an island setting to your creative vision, part of the game’s fun—playing with other people—is going to be a bit modified thanks to the Coronavirus quarantine. You can pay for Nintendo’s Switch Online subscription service to visit other players’ islands (or invite them to yours), of course, but you’ll both need to be friends (unless you share “Dodo Codes,” a temporary “friendship number” that you can use instead).

It sounds more confusing than it is. However, becoming friends with someone via the Switch can be a bit annoying if you aren’t doing the “link to Facebook or Twitter” route, or some variation thereof. One person will have to send the other a good ol’ fashioned Nintendo friend code—because simply using a person’s online handle is just too easy. And while that’s easy to type into a text message or a Facebook chat, it lacks elegance.

For Animal Crossing: New Horizons players especially, I recommend checking out the site Dodo Airlines. Not only is the name delightful, but you can use it to generate cute little Animal Crossing-themed passports that you can send to friends or post on social media to kick off your island tours.

All you have to do is enter your name, friend code, a cute name for your island, and pick what you want your little avatar to look like on your passport. You can even add up to six stamps for super-extra realism, if you want. Once you’re done, your passport will look something like this:

A perfect likeness, if I do say so myself. If that’s not enough, you can also use Dodo Airlines to create a little application for your island, which allows you to provide even more detail: a particular fruit you enjoy, who else in the Animal Crossing world inhabits it, and where it’s (theoretically) located.

The site even lets you make greeting cards:

It’s perfect, isn’t it? May these digital creations help you start what’s sure to be an epic year of bug catching, shell selling, and shoveling. Were I not caught up in Stardew Valley, I’d be right there with you.