Author: Trafficblast

Things won’t be getting stranger until at least next year, with the Season 4 Stranger Things trailer dropping on Valentine’s Day of this year. But the show remains an excellent watch, not too serious but just serious enough to stand up to multiple rewatches. If you’re a Stranger Things fan like I am, the good news is we just added a ton of Stranger Things designs to the IGN Store to tide you over.

Stranger Things T-Shirts and Pullovers

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Stranger Things is just one of tons of officially licensed properties we have available in the IGN Store. We keep adding more, too, so check back regularly. Right now you can find some truly awesome designs from The Legend of Zelda, X-Men, Animal Crossing, DC Comics and way, way more.

 

In Animal Crossing: New Leaf, you could travel to a tropical island and find a variety of different fish, bugs, and fruit. This island was always the same, permanently in summer year-round. The Mystery Tour in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is an extension of this feature, with a variety of deserted islands to visit (but within your own hemisphere and season).

Mystery Tour islands are much smaller than your main island, but they’re great for meeting new villagers, gathering extra resources, and even making tons of money if you’re lucky. We’ve rounded up our best tips for deserted-island hopping as well as all the types of Mystery Tour islands we’ve found so far.

For more Animal Crossing guides, be sure to check out our guide hub, which links out to our various features explaining and answering some of the game’s biggest subjects. Otherwise, read our Animal Crossing: New Horizons review in progress.

How To Travel To A Deserted Island

Once your airport is open (starting the second day you play the game), you’ll be able to use a Nook Miles Ticket to go to a deserted island. You can purchase Nook Miles Tickets for 2,000 Nook Miles each at the Nook Stop machine in Resident Services.

Once you have a ticket, talk to Orville at the airport, select the “I wanna fly!” option, and then select “Use Nook Miles Ticket.” You’ll then be whisked away to a random island on your Mystery Tour!

These islands come in a variety of styles ranging from pretty basic to rare and lucrative; we’ve detailed all the types we’ve encountered so far below. Keep in mind that an island is generated each time you buy a Nook Miles Ticket, which means you can’t keep resetting the game to try and get a different island with the same ticket.

What To Do On A Deserted Island

Depending on the type of island you get, there are a few different approaches you can take to make the most of your Mystery Tour. No matter what, we recommend emptying your pockets of everything except for your tools, as there is no way to send or otherwise keep any resources beyond your pocket capacity once you’ve left the deserted island.

Stock Up On Resources

Deserted islands are great for gathering resources. Each island can be completely emptied of resources with no repercussions; you’ll never return to an island you’ve already visited.

Like on your own island, on Mystery Tour islands, you can gather weeds, tree branches, wood, fruit, clay, stone, and iron, as well as catch bugs and fish. You may also find a fossil buried in the ground or a DIY recipe in a bottle on the beach. You can even eat fruit on the island to gain super strength and dig up trees to take home–including coconut trees you can plant on your own beach.

Mystery Tours are a great way to get all the resources you need to build Nook’s Cranny–which requires 30 iron and 30 of all three types of wood–in a short amount of time. Mining for these resources on a deserted island is a great option once you’ve depleted your own island’s resources for the day.

If your tools wear out, you can either craft some more with the resources on the deserted island or buy flimsy tools for 100 Nook Miles each from Wilbur, the Dodo Airlines pilot. The tools purchased can still be upgraded with an iron ore to the higher-tier tool.

Meet New Villagers

A great way to control who moves into your island home is by inviting specific villagers yourself. You can find potential new island villagers on deserted islands, usually with a campfire of some kind, who will glady move into your town if asked.

Villagers will only spawn on deserted islands if you have room for them to move onto your main island and a plot picked out for a new house. If you have 10 villagers living on your island or no open plots, you won’t find anyone on these islands.

Seek Out Better Weather

While it’s not guaranteed, the weather on any given Mystery Tour island can be different from that of your own island. This can be useful for finding different fish or bugs that spawn in different weather–say, if it’s raining on your island and you want to catch rain-shy bugs.

Make Money

Some Mystery Tour islands are rife with money-making opportunities, so you should be on the lookout for some of the more lucrative types of islands. Below, we’ve outlined the kinds of islands we’ve found so far and what different opportunities you can find on each.

Deserted Island Types

There are different kinds of Mystery Tour islands you can encounter, with some being rarer than others. No matter which island you get, we recommend at least hitting all the rocks–as iron and gold nuggets are a relatively scarce resource–and scanning the shore for DIY recipes before you leave.

Standard Islands

Sometimes, you’ll just get a pretty normal island. These islands will have your native fruit, a normal assortment of trees and flowers, and a basic river with no apparent difference in the type or frequency of bug and fish spawns. There will be a few rocks, all of which contain resources (no money rocks, in other words), and one tree will have furniture in it. Many of these islands will also have one fossil, while the rarer islands usually don’t.

Spiral Island

A kind of standard island, there’s a layout in which the river runs in a spiral with a rock at the center of the island. We haven’t noticed a big difference in what you can get on these islands, but maybe they’ll inspire some of your island designs down the road.

Cliff Island

Also apparently a subset of the standard island, we’ve found islands that are primarily cliffs, with most of the river up on the cliffs as well. While everything else about the island is pretty normal, you’ll have an easier time grinding for clifftop fish with this layout.

Rock Island

We’ve also encountered an island that just has a bunch of rocks at the center atop a cliff. All the rocks contain crafting materials, so again, no money rocks.

Foreign Fruit Island

This one is slightly more rare. It is otherwise a normal island, except all the trees are fruit trees–and it’s a different fruit than the one native to your island! You can pick the fruit and take it home to sell or plant (we recommend planting it first).

There are five possible fruits–apples, oranges, peaches, cherries, and pears–and the four fruits that aren’t native to your island sell for 500 bells each. Bringing back and planting these foriegn fruit trees can be a great way to make some real cash. If you want to dig up the whole tree and bring it back with you, we recommend eating coconuts to gain the strength to do so; coconuts are less valuable than foreign fruits.

Bamboo Island

Somewhat common, the bamboo island only has bamboo on it–no rivers or ponds, though it does have rocks, coconut trees, and sometimes fossils. You can dig up bamboo shoots and plant them on your island, or you can eat some coconuts and dig up the bamboo trees whole.

Bamboo is an important resource in crafting, so it’s also a good idea to take a flimsy or stone axe to the bamboo trees and harvest as much bamboo as you can while you’re there.

Hybrid Flower Island

Even more rare is an island covered in hybrid flowers–pink, black, orange, purple, or blue flowers whose seeds you can’t buy from Timmy and Tommy. They’ll usually be accompanied by butterflies, many of which only spawn around these rare hybrid flowers. In addition to catching these butterflies, which should fetch a good price, you should dig up and take home a few of each color so you can keep catching rare butterflies at home.

Money Rock Island

If you ever find an island where there’s a group of rocks in the center, surrounded by a river, then you have hit the jackpot. Those rocks are all money rocks, just like the one rock that spawns every day on the main island.

To reach the middle, you’ll need to smash the one rock blocking the path; you can do this by eating a piece of fruit and hitting the rock with a shovel. Once you’ve smashed the rock you can use your vaulting pole to reach the middle. Make sure to dig some holes directly behind you before you start hitting each rock–this will ensure you can hit them in quick succession and get the whole 16,100 bells from each rock.

Tarantula Island

An island to fuel your nightmares, the tarantula island is inhabited by a seemingly infinite number of tarantulas. They sell for 8,000 bells each, so catch as many as you can carry. This is absolutely one of the jackpot islands, even if it’s a little creepy.

Trash Island

This island appears normal and consists of regular trees and flowers like every other island; the catch is that the river, lake, and ocean are full of trash. Fishing on this island will only yield trash items (cans, tires, and boots). The upside is that, by catching a bunch of trash, you’ll at least unlock some DIY recipes.

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Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is launching on Steam Early Access on March 30, a day earlier than expected. The sequel, developed by TaleWorlds Entertainment, has been eight years in the making.

On top of releasing a day early, Mount & Blade II will also be available for 10% off during the first two weeks of sale. Anyone who owns a previous title in the series will be eligible for an additional 10% off in select digital stores, too. The reason for this? The coronavirus, of course. “It might seem like a pretty ideal time to release a game (after all, everyone is at home right!?),” the studio said in a blog post. “But we know that the current situation has placed a lot of people in a difficult position when it comes to balancing their finances and risking their health,” so it decided to introduce some discounts.

TaleWorlds has recently been working on the game remotely, but that hasn’t slowed down development. “We have tried to make the best of a bad situation and thankfully, with the help of our IT team, have been able to continue work on the project from home. This has come with its own challenges of course, but we are still very grateful and lucky to work in an industry where it is possible to work remotely, which we know isn’t the case for many of you.”

As for what’s included in the Early Access release, there are Custom Battle and Campaign modes available in single player. The Campaign is a new addition for the series, introducing a more structured approach to the traditional Mount & Blade experience. It blends a storyline and key events with the more familiar sandbox gameplay, giving you clear goals and objectives to complete on the path to victory. You can always opt to ignore the campaign missions, though, and plot your own rise to power instead.

Character creation is still a key aspect as you build a backstory and venture out onto the continent of Calradia, hiring companions, raising warbands and armies, conquering towns and castles, progressing your character’s skills and equipment, and plenty more. In terms of multiplayer, there are four different game modes to play: Skirmish, Captain, Team Deathmatch, and Siege. TeamWorlds says it will continue to introduce new features, game modes, and other additional content to multiplayer throughout Mount & Blade II’s time in Early Access.

While there’s a lot of content to get stuck into right away, there will still be bugs and glitches, balancing issues, missing features, and placeholder content. If you want to see everything the game has to offer, TaleWorld’s suggests holding off on buying it until the full release. If you want an early taste and the opportunity to provide feedback, however, you can hop straight into Mount & Blade II’s battlefields next week.

Gearbox has been steadily raising overall power level of Borderlands 3 with events that offer more generous drops and level cap increases. Still, you may be missing out on some high-level gear, so the developer has made it easier than ever to get great loot for a limited time. Until April 2, you can just buy it.

A “Door Busters Mini Event” in the game adds legendary weapons and items to vending machines. That applies across all types of gear, so you can get legendary mods and shields from med vending machines, and legendary grenades from ammo vendors, in addition to legendary guns.

Some legendary items are one-of-a-kind collectibles with special properties, which you can usually tell if the name of the gear makes some kind of reference to another piece of Borderlands lore or even other video games. Others are just super-charged versions of epic or rare guns with stronger stats or more modifiers. Note that some special legendaries are locked to story missions, and as a result probably can’t be found in vending machines. As usual for vending machines, the gear offered will be roughly matched to your current level, so the higher your stats the better loot you can buy.

This comes just after the release of the latest DLC, which came with a level cap increase. That increased the level cap to 57, which allows you to unlock two capstone skills. Gearbox has said it expects this to significantly raise the overall power level of players who are making their way through endgame content like Mayhem levels. With this limited-time event, you’ll be able to get some shiny new guns to match.

All Chinese cinemas have reportedly been ordered to close their doors again, just a short while after some venues were permitted to resume trading after being suspended for months.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, China’s national film bureau issued a decree to exhibitors on Friday, ordering all cinemas to shutdown while offering no reason for the policy change or a timeframe for reopening. However, the outlet reports that “industry insiders instantly began speculating that the government was worried about a potential second wave of coronavirus infections.”

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Approximately 600 small venues out of the country’s 70,000 movie theatres reopened over the course of the past week after initially shutting all of their cinemas in January, as a lockdown measure to help prevent the further spread of coronavirus (COVID-19).

Earlier in the week, China Film Group unveiled a plan to attract customers and fill seats with a programme of blockbuster films, including the Avengers franchise, James Cameron’s Avatar, and Christopher Nolan’s Inception and Interstellar, making the reversal on the country’s decision to gradually reopen their complexes even more surprising to stakeholders.

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“This second closure will not be a one- or two-week issue,” an executive at a major exhibition company told the publication. “They are going to be even more cautious when they attempt to reopen again — and this will set us back a long time.”

Elsewhere, production and distribution executives reportedly expressed their concerns over the limited options available to studios, as regulators have apparently discouraged the sale of unreleased feature films to local streaming services in order to boost the country’s theatrical exhibition infrastructure with new titles once everything is back up and running.

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While more and more movie theatres have been forced to temporarily shutdown as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, streaming services have moved even further into the spotlight, as consumers have been looking for alternative ways to connect with their friends without having to leave the comfort of their sofas.

Some have turned to Netflix Party, a Google Chrome extension that allows multiple users to stream a Netflix show or movie together at the same time, however, a recent surge in online traffic has presented new concerns over bandwidth strain. As a result, Netflix and YouTube have committed to defaulting streaming quality to standard definition across Europe.

For a list of recommendations on how best to help, and stay safe, during the Coronavirus pandemic, please read our resource guide.

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Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.

Pokemon Go developer Niantic has had to cancel a number of this month’s events due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but the Psychic Spectacular is going on as planned. The event is now underway, and it makes it easier to find Psychic Pokemon–and a new Shiny–for a limited time.

Until 10 PM local time on March 30, Psychic-type monsters such as Wobbuffet, Girafarig, Bronzor, and others will appear more frequently in the wild. You’ll also have your first chance to find a Shiny Baltoy, as well as two new Gen 5 Psychic Pokemon: Solosis and Gothita. The former will be more common during the day, while the latter will appear at night.

In addition to the increased wild spawn rates, you’ll be able to get special event-related Field Research tasks from PokeStops. You’re also more likely to hatch the following Psychic Pokemon from 2 km eggs throughout the event:

• Abra
• Drowzee
• Ralts
• Spoink
• Baltoy
• Wynaut
• Beldum
• Gothita

In other Pokemon Go news, Niantic is soon rolling out a handy new feature for the game called Today View. This tab will be located in the same menu as your Field Research and Special Research tasks, and it will display ongoing and upcoming in-game events and personal stats such as your daily streaks, making it easier to keep track of everything that’s happening in the game.

Landorus, the third and final member of the Forces of Nature trio, is also coming to the game soon. The Legendary Pokemon is slated to invade Raids beginning March 31, although it remains to be seen if the COVID-19 pandemic will affect Niantic’s plans. Another Legendary, Lugia, was supposed to return to the game for a special Raid event earlier this month, but Niantic had to cancel that. Instead, Cobalion will remain in the game a little longer as a Go Battle League reward.