Guides › System
Aniimo social guide: gifting, Affinity and Homeland visits
A Gift of Affection gives you and a friend 30 Affinity each. Some gift boxes hold an egg for the Hatchinator, and you can send gift boxes five times a week.
The short version
- Some gift boxes from friends contain an Aniimo egg, which you hatch at a Hatchinator like any other egg.
- Friends can send each other gift boxes up to five times per week, and a Gift of Affection awards 30 friendship affinity to both sender and recipient.
- Affinity is tracked separately for each friend. It rises through chatting, gestures, home visits, map activities, team dungeons, trading, gifting and beating elite bosses together.
- Higher Affinity unlocks emotes, higher-level mood exchanges and awards. It also lets you trade rarer Aniimo, with the maximum tradable potential rising through caps of 8, 9 and 10.
- A daily direct message renews the spark and awards 10 sparks per friend, capped at 30 per day.
Aniimo keeps a separate friendship score with every person on your friends list. The game calls it Affinity, and you will also see it called intimacy or friendship level. It decides which emotes you can use with that person, which rewards you collect, and how good the Aniimo you can trade with them can be.
Gifts are the most direct way to raise it, and some of them come with an egg inside. This guide covers what gift boxes give you, every way to raise Affinity, what higher levels unlock, and the small daily habits that earn sparks.
Gift boxes and the eggs inside them
You and your friends can send each other gift boxes. Some of them reward the recipient with an Aniimo egg, and you hatch that egg at a Hatchinator the same way you hatch any other egg. If a friend's gift left an egg in your inventory, that is where it goes.
Gifting has limits. Friends can send each other gift boxes up to five times per week, so with a long friends list you have to choose who gets them.
The Gift of Affection is the one to know. Sending it awards 30 friendship affinity to the sender and the recipient alike, so neither of you is doing the other a one-sided favour. Gifts also cover the days you cannot play together. Exchanging them raises Affinity and can stand in for shared activities when your schedules do not line up.
Five
Gift boxes per week between friends
Every way to raise Affinity with a friend
Affinity is per friend, and it rises through ordinary play together. You do not need a special mode for it. The game counts all of these:
Talking and chatting, including daily interactions. Using unlocked interactive emotes, which the game calls gestures, with that friend. Meeting up in the world and visiting their Home. Teaming up and fighting alongside each other, completing map activities and clearing team dungeons together. Trading Aniimo and giving gifts.
Bosses count too. Defeating elite bosses together raises Affinity, and so does beating Alpha or Omega creatures with a friend three times. Co-op play itself has its own article on this site; the point here is that every fight you share is also feeding your friendship score.
The practical upshot: a friend you play with regularly will climb without you thinking about it. A friend you rarely see is the one to send gifts and messages to, because those work on days you are not online together.
What higher Affinity unlocks
Raising Affinity with a friend unlocks emotes, higher-level mood exchanges and awards. The emotes then feed back into the loop, since using unlocked gestures with that friend raises Affinity again.
The bigger reward is trading. To trade Aniimo at all, you must be on each other's friends list and reach a specific affinity level, and item trading and higher-tier Aniimo trading each need their own friendship levels. Trading and gifting come with further costs and limitations on top. As Affinity rises, the range of Aniimo you can trade widens to include rarer, higher-level creatures and special forms. The maximum tradable potential rises through caps of 8, 9 and 10, so the best creatures only move between friends who have put the time in.
- Cap 8The first maximum tradable potential named.
- Cap 9Higher friendship raises the cap.
- Cap 10The highest cap named, for rarer and higher level trades.
Sparks from daily messages
Chatting earns sparks, also called fire bolts, which count as event sparks. Renewing the spark with a friend through a daily direct message awards 10 sparks per friend. Spark renewal is capped at 30 sparks per day, so messaging more friends than the cap allows earns you nothing extra that day.
The social system pays out a little more on top. Adding friends and chatting earns 10 sparks per friend who replies, or 30 for chatting with three different players. Exchanging messages with friends is the habit that does it, and it costs you a minute.
30
Daily cap on sparks from renewing the spark
Web events, photo mode and a quieter world
The web events have their own social rules. In the Time to Aniimo! web event, no on-screen notification confirms that an Aniimo exchange has gone through, so do not wait for one. The pre-launch Aniimo Together web event rewarded a completed six-member squad with an Anapod Ultra, credits and evolution stones.
Two settings matter when you share the world with others. Other players' messages and markers can be hidden in the settings, including the mark sharing options, if a busy map gets in your way. And when your group does meet up, the built-in photo mode handles full-team shots and individual creature posing, with filters and other settings to adjust.
Where to start
Pick the friends you actually play with and send them your weekly gift boxes, Gift of Affection first. Message them daily for sparks. Let shared fights and home visits do the rest, because higher Affinity is what opens up trading for rarer Aniimo.
Most of this page was re-checked against the released game on 2 October 2026. The rest has not been re-confirmed since release.