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Original Text ("Reading a Sign 43 Times Heals Your Axe Durability" by Hunter R.)

We all know that the axe in Animal Crossing will usually break after using it too much. Of course, the axe is intentionally designed to break like this in order to make the unbreakable Golden Axe an appealing item to unlock. And yet what if I told you that by simply reading a sign over and over you can actually prevent your standard axe from ever breaking? And no, I'm not joking—you can actually sit here and read this sign over and over to heal the durability on your axe, making it theoretically invincible. I'm sure a lot of you are wondering how or why this even works, so let's take a closer look.

Creating an unbreakable axe is a really funny glitch that was recently discovered by Animal Crossing spreadsheet owner Phil. To understand how interacting with a sign heals your axe, let's discuss how axe durability works.

Normally an axe can withstand 72 hits on normal trees before breaking. Since trees take three hits to cut down, you can effectively cut down 24 trees with a standard axe before it breaks. However, to encourage players to only use the axe on trees, the axe will lose durability at three times the rate if it collides with anything other than a tree. To handle this programmatically, the game essentially uses two counters to keep track of the axe's total durability. The hit counter goes up by one every time an axe is used against a tree, but this counter will instead go up by three every time it's used against any other object. Every time this hit counter is greater than or equal to 9, a durability point will be added to your axe. Increasing this durability also changes the axe ID in your hand and there are eight different axes in the game for each state of durability your axe has.

So essentially the game keeps track of your axe's damage by just having eight different axe items that are swapped in and out as you continue to use it. When you're on the final axe ID and the durability counter gets increased, every value gets cleared and the axe breaks.

This approach is normally fine and mostly works as intended but of course I'm talking about it so there are some issues with this. First, while your axe's durability is saved by the game upon exiting and is tied to each axe, the actual hit counter is cleared upon every reload. Remember you only get a durability point if you increase the hit counter to nine or higher, so this means you can hit a tree eight times, save and quit and reload back in to reset your axe's hit counter back to zero. This effectively already creates an unbreakable axe if you keep track of your hits and cheese the durability by saving and quitting, but of course it takes a lot of time to save and reset in Animal Crossing so if you actually save and reset every eight hits on your axe then I think you're pretty crazy.

Luckily there's a more time efficient method to reset your axe's hit counter although it's arguably even crazier. I mentioned that your axe will lose durability at three times the rate if you hit something other than a tree. When you swing your axe, the game handles this programmatically by detecting what's directly in front of you in order to see if the axe will collide with a tree or a different object.

To sum this up, the entire flow looks something like this: if the axe is in the player's hands and the player presses A, the game will run code to detect what's directly in front of the player. If there's a tree in front of the player, the game will immediately increase the axe's hit counter by one, but if there's any other object in front of the player the game will instead increase the axe's hit counter by three.

If you're in front of an object other than a tree, the game will attempt to put the player in the reflected axe state where the animation of your axe recoiling normally plays. The moment the axe animation collides with an object, the durability check occurs to see if the hit counter is greater than or equal to 9. If it is, the durability of your axe increases and a new damaged axe ID is replaced in your hand. Anytime your axe's durability is increased, the game will reset the hit counter back to zero for the next cycle.

The issue is that the hit counter is increased immediately when pressing A but the durability check only occurs if the animation of the axe being swung is allowed to play. This means if we can interrupt this process after the hit counter is increased but before the animation plays, we can effectively increase the hit counter without allowing the game to do the durability check.

It turns out this is incredibly easy to do because the game assigns both axe swinging and interacting with objects to the A button. So for example, if we sit in front of the bulletin board with our axe out and press A, the game will detect the bulletin board in front of the player and say "hey there's an object here that's not a tree so I'm going to increase the hit counter by three." The game then attempts to put you in the recoiled axe state and play the animation, but this process gets interrupted by the higher priority of reading the actual bulletin board. So instead of playing the axe animation, the bulletin board submenu comes up and effectively cancels the rest of the axe process.

However, the hit counter was still incremented by three from initially pressing A with our axe out in front of the bulletin board. This means by just reading the bulletin board with our axe out we can increase the hit counter by three every single time we read it. Additionally, since we're interrupting the axe process, the check to clear the hit counter never plays out so we can actually increment this value way past 9, which is normally not possible.

In memory your hit counter is stored as a single byte, meaning we can increment it all the way to FF or 255 and actually overflow it back to zero if we want. So for example if we use our axe normally on trees 71 times, then using it one more time will typically cause the axe to break. However, if we go to the bulletin board with our axe out and read it 83 times, we can actually overflow the hit counter back to zero and effectively get nine more hits out of our axe before it breaks.

But we can still do even better. The expected value of the hit counter is a signed byte which has a range of -128 to positive 127. This means that if the value of the hit counter is 128 or higher, the game will interpret the value as a negative number less than 9 and not update the durability.

So let's use the same example and say we have an axe that is one hit away from breaking. If we then interact with the bulletin board 40 times, our hit counter is now 128 or hex 80, so now when we use our axe normally the hit counter will continue to go up but the durability check will not update until the hit counter overflows back to zero. Thus we can now use the axe an extra 136 times before the counter overflows back to zero and falls back in the range of expected values above 9.

Since a brand new axe can normally only withstand 72 hits, we've effectively nearly doubled the durability of a standard axe just by using this exploit once. Of course we can just keep reading the sign every time the axe is about to break to create an infinite durability axe if we so desire.

While this is a cool exploit, you have to be pretty aware of your axe's internal counters to make use of it in normal gameplay. This exploit is actually more likely to be detrimental. All this time I've talked about reading the sign to increase the durability of your axe, but this also works the other way around. Since reading the bulletin board with your axe out will always increase the hit counter by three, you must read the bulletin board at least 40 times if you don't want to lose durability.

In a scenario where you buy a brand new axe, read the bulletin board three times and hit a tree once, your durability counter will increase even though you only use the axe a single time. If you intentionally abuse this you can actually break your brand new axe in just nine hits, which reduces its total usage by a disgusting 87.5%. So if you ever read the bulletin board with your axe out, make sure to warm those thumbs up and hit that button at least 40 more times if you don't want to lose your axe durability.

This glitch can also happen by just opening any door with your axe out or by interacting with the town tune board outside of the post office. The same rules I just explained also apply here, so if you don't value your time you can also increase your axe's durability by opening a door 40 times over and over with your axe out, but using the bulletin board is way faster.

Still, this is definitely fun to play with and I hope you enjoyed this short little insight into this newer glitch. Special thank you to Phil from the spreadsheet team for sharing this discovery and testing alongside me a while back. Further shout out to Kyler for decompiling the axe states and giving us a definitive look at the root cause.

Global Order scrambled + character scrambling per word:

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tI tiencfeif odor neptrdruite ymreom by nrcdaseie, to it ryuo rnsoecut tsuj ratrege of wahts rsespes aueql deus eevn lilw erthe eth ttnoub. fo tno exa noynnililtaet oyu eadr usjt rsetod dnah igeth tis reEvy roftn in het aex illw oyur nisingwg no na lppya ngsaiat msean anc rezriac. nca amnlyrlo oenc, eht isth adetnis hit hist ro teh betrte. nvigah oru fi ujts yever ckab rendgia egiht tou hegti nnei heT asy put hte animAl axe rboda hsit, hgirnsa ageecrnou roev tbu hierhg, ihst to we rgnae bdyuiratli xea nac ro si deus ehre, emasn orfm otreucn ouetsid agme ntgiexi 9 tyciallyp uory reest lliw ynlomalr seva fvtfeceylei eandtis eth if eth teims get etlinlyesas if rehe To a dan ear not hte iopxetl mnemot ihdstawtn raesect but aex yuo this eax nrtuoec ayw si htiw acn batou nad ornmal ot lnbtieul oerv qtiu the ot fI sue ew this: mega khecc gnchsae mmtiidaeeyl to eorvlfwo nca aex thi eax, nerve yb fi Im in teh adn teser aex, eW ettdce you odtn if svae eax hti toalt eht tsih iedfvntiie ynlo caryz.

Lyulikc teh lamrno heert narsicee hte lbueitnl asol ichwh ryuo nrotf 40 FF of eorm abker ot laarguyb yuro uro xtpdeece biilvinnce. no, a iwht axe htta 08, tboh a ayslp, gsiihtn exa eerfob lseta a slilt hte si iyagpln od fo dna rdore sit eus coreus erylal rae ruocetn eecianrs arde nda other eth up, the xea xea, alyrep to sageu edxeectp won ptino yrou ihts tih ngopine eht usm eht uoyr or ohert sah.

oS ehret eth outba dan aosl ew illst rueoy amge heWn gte on 78.5%. hte uyo imte to uoyr the in prmollaagcryimat eax enco. nigs hit rCogsisn hti the pobsiles.

In eax hwti eTh tenitarc xea on if all mofr the xsea iyliinlat 04 notip aetk bkac teh ot atshw sevlforwo dan scrcuo ays of us noclku. henw eth a teh besotcj tih yb ligens lpya. kloo.

gitnaeCr iwll hwti brlyauitid. on theor Plih mraw ynaerl cna nda dan inenmag ybu ti axe oepssrc oesl we ucoenrt uroy ulbtenil eahv taluca dasartnd you tdirnefef 136 eimt hte etvpoisi itme teh sTih hte kpee xrate raaew iryiltadbu ot wsgun bkresa.

iThs eth glchit tbrluiyadi npou rkswo xae lony to in iwhhc ewre btu eht kesta by teh twan xae urn of 9.

ienSc isth eht hti teh the nliaAm in ti