science

Nookazon

Nookazon is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Nookazon rather than just read about it. In short: Nookazon () is a fan-made website that allows players of the 2020 video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons to trade and sell items in-game using their services. The website is named after Amazon, although it more closely resembles Craigslist and eBay.

Key takeaways

Nookazon belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Nookazon to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Nookazon from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Nookazon () is a fan-made website that allows players of the 2020 video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons to trade and sell items in-game using their services. The website is named after Amazon, although it more closely resembles Craigslist and eBay. The website allows users to discover other players selling a specific in-game item and buy the item for a set price, or make an offer. In addition to in-game items such as furniture, fruit and clothing, the website accommodates for trading "villagers" (in-game inhabitants), which comprise a large part of Animal Crossing's gameplay. The name "Nookazon" is a portmanteau of "Tom Nook", the name of one of New Horizons's main characters, and the name "Amazon". The website was developed to be an alternative to the trading system of the original Animal Crossing: New Horizons Discord server. It surged in popularity after Daniel Luu posted a TikTok about it. The website now includes an app.

Development Nookazon was founded on April 9, 2020. The website was created and is run by Daniel Luu, a 25-year old software developer also known by the username squishguin on internet platforms. Luu created the website as a result of his frustrations with the current trading systems. He joined the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Discord server, and found a trading message thread there, but was overwhelmed with the quantity of traders and the unorganized nature of the platform. He decided to make a website to solve this problem, with the help of two of his friends. In an interview with SquadState.com, he stated:

So, I got pretty far in the game pretty quickly. I put in a lot of hours, especially during the quarantine. We have so much free time even after work, so I was putting hours and hours and hours into the game and I wanted to see what else was out there, so I decided to join the Animal Crossing Discord. And in the Discord, there's a couple of different channels for trading – fruit trading, furniture trading, things like that – and it's just chaos, right? I mean, when you look at these channels, there's just so many messages, the wait times on each channel are multiple minutes. I'm a software engineer by trade, and I really wanted to put my developer skills to the test and build a marketplace. That's really where it started. I wanted to just organize everything and make it easier for players to connect with each other and trade items.

Cataloguing One of the challenges Luu faced when creating Nookazon involved categorizing the many items of furniture and clothing within Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing: New Horizons contains thousands of individual items, all of which had to be catalogued with various colours in order to be listed on the website. To solve this problem, Luu used a "spreadsheet community" in order to create a comprehensive catalogue for all the game's items. He said that "The spreadsheet community is just a small Discord server that was putting together a spreadsheet that had all the Animal Crossing items in it, including pictures and names and variations and things like that." This allowed him to easily account for all of the game's items. The spreadsheet is organised on Google Docs (found here).

Popularity The website went live on 9 April 2020. However, the website received a huge surge in popularity after Luu posted a 15-second TikTok demonstrating how to use the website. After that, internet traffic on the website surged from 6,000 to 180,000 overnight. The website grew beyond the scope of the Animal Crossing Discord, and eventually became an important part of the community, facilitating many trades per day. Daniel Luu stated, about the surge in popularity and the difficulties he faced with it, that:

I've built plenty of apps before—apps and websites—but nothing like this. [Nookazon] blowing up really challenged me technically as a developer and also a leader of a community. I've worked in other communities and things like that before, but something of this size really was hard to manage... From a technical perspective, we have over 200,000 unique visitors on the site every day, so making sure that the application is fast and that everybody can do everything they want to do—wishlist things, catalogue things—is a big challenge. But it's been an incredible learning experience. I don't think I would have ever gotten this experience without having Nookazon blow up like it did.

Current release Nookazon is split into two main areas; one is the Nookazon website, which is constructed entirely from scratch and is managed by Daniel Luu and two of his friends; the other, the Nookazon Discord server, is built using channels and bots, and, (as of May 2026) has over 375,000 members, thirty volunteer moderators and is managed by Daniel Luu's friend Brandon. There is also a social media team, composed of three people, that manages Nookazon's social media accounts, compromising of their Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Facebook profiles, as well as announcements about the website. The website has 270,000 daily unique users and reaches seven million page views a day. Daniel Luu has taken development of the site full time. He stated that "I've cut out a lot of hobbies, like watching YouTube, and spend most of my free time on the site. I don't mind though, because I love working on it, and I would probably be making another app or website if it wasn't Nookazon." In October 2020, Nookazon held "Spookazon" events, various competitions based around Halloween.

Trading

The website does not carry out the trade itself; it shows a catalogue of items, that in turn display potential sellers. In this respect, it functions more like the online marketplace eBay. The trade is then carried out in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The website forbids the use of real-life currency; it instead is built off of Animal Crossing: New Horizons's currency of "Bells". The majority of the website's trading is done either on the website itself or on the accompanying Discord server. The website has a comprehensive listing of all the items in the game, created by use of spreadsheets provided by the community. The website has more than nine million item listings. The most popular items on the site are Nook Miles Tickets, followed by the cutting board, ironwood dresser, crescent-moon chair and fish bait.

Trading

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

The original Nookazon logo, based upon the Amazon logo. The logo has been updated since launch. The current logo is based upon the Animal Crossing iconography (being the leaf) and is designed by @jayquality.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Nookazon

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Nookazon claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Nookazon before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Nookazon ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Nookazon

In research: Nookazon appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Nookazon in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Nookazon is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Animal Crossing, E-commerce, Gaming websites, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Nookazon outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Nookazon in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Nookazon means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Nookazon out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Nookazon in simple terms?

Why does Nookazon matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Nookazon?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Nookazon.