19 best Animal Crossing: New Horizons tips: real versus fake art, friendship with villagers and more

Beware of fake art

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The latest Animal Crossing update introduced Redd, the art-dealing fox that fans of the series may already be familiar with. Redd sells paintings with which you can fill the new wing of your museum, but he also tries to download imitations of unconscious players. When you ask to inspect a painting before buying it, compare it with guides like this to see if you should drop the money or keep the bells for yourself.

Alternatively, if you don’t want a simple cheat sheet to identify counterfeits, you can use Google Lens to identify paintings, then make your own attempt to find discrepancies.

Get extra Nook Miles

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During the Nature Day event, the Nook Miles app will offer daily challenges with big wins, generally offering rewards of at least 1,000 Nook Miles for simple tasks like planting some bushes or making a flower crown. If you want lots of easy Nook miles, keep an eye out for daily bonuses.

Travel back in time before moving on

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Time travel is a major topic of conversation in the Animal Crossing community, and it’s controversial. As the game unfolds in real time, you must wait day to build buildings and grow plants. And Animal Crossing: New Horizons begins slow. So if you suspect you’ll want a faster start, consider setting your Nintendo Switch’s clock for 7-10 days. That way, as you play, you can increase it one day every few hours to cover some of the first parts of the slower development game more quickly.

By delaying the clock before you start, instead of zooming in later, you also have the opportunity to go back in real time. That way, you can pretend you never cheated (and you don’t have to have a clunky watch forever).

Do not stop paying your debts

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Tom Nook, the wealthy business raccoon who funds his adventure and constantly pressures him to spend more money than he has, puts him in what seems like deep debt on his first day. It takes a little time to accumulate Nook Miles, an achievement-based currency, early in the game, but work to earn them quickly and pay off that first debt as quickly as possible. The faster you pay off your first loan, the faster Tom will build a house and, most importantly, give you the extra storage you need for everything you are about to start collecting.

Find all kinds of fruit

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The first fruit you find on your island, I found pears, it sells for 100 bells per piece. But as you get more “foreign fruit,” you can sell it for up to 500 bells each. The problem is that finding those pesky fruit trees can be a challenge, even if you spend all your Nook Miles traveling in search of other islands.

However, since each player starts with different fruits on their island, one of the easiest ways to make the six types of trees grow at home is by sharing. If you have friends playing, you can travel to their island. If not, you can always search Reddit for strangers who share public codes so you can get some new fruits to grow. And remember, if you don’t have a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, you can always get a 7-day free trial to find what you need and then cancel before they charge you.

Fruit gives you superpowers

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If you eat fruit, you will notice a counter in the upper left corner of the screen. This gauge shows how many pieces of fruit you’ve eaten (up to 10), and for each one, you can perform a super feat, like breaking a stone or digging up a full tree. Digging trees helps make forests easier to collect, and when you visit other islands, it helps transplant new fruit trees without having to wait for them to grow back. Everything said, DO NOT BREAK THE ROCKS! In fact…

DO NOT BREAK THE ROCKS

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Iron, clay, and stone are useful resources early in the game, but they are hard to come by. When you hit a rock with an ax or shovel, it spits out one of these three resources. But you only get a handful. “So,” you’re thinking, “let me eat some fruit and hit a rock. Then I’ll get all resources, right? ” Incorrect! When you break a rock, you’ll get a single resource, and you’ll have to wait for another rock to appear in another part of the island (which, remember, takes days in real time). The two exceptions are if you are trying to make room for another construction, or if you are destroying rocks to reproduce closer to your home for easier harvesting.

Catch all fish and insects

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Another early tip: catch all the animals you see, consisting of fish and insects. Watch for flowers to spot bedbugs and mantises, hook butterflies in forests, and shake trees and rocks to find insects and spiders. This is how my colleague caught the elusive string fish.

As soon as you craft your first bug net and fishing rod, start delivering your collected creatures to Tom Nook. Sure, you could sell these creatures to Timmy and Tommy, the island’s resident traders, but Tom Nook will send each unique discovery to his friend Blathers, the owl, who lives off the island.

Simply put, after enough donations, Blathers the Owl will come to build a museum on the island and take you to a much larger collection project, opening up the game considerably.

Plant lots of fruit (and even money)

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Fruit trees are a great way to earn an income early in the game, and once you get a shovel, planting a pear or apple tree is easy and quickly worthwhile. Another semi-secret form of income: money trees!

Around the island, beams of gold occasionally shine from the ground. Dig them up and you’ll find a bag of bells (the island’s main currency). Instead of bagging the bells and covering the hole, you can plant the bag to grow a money tree. In fact, if you select the bells in your inventory and hand out a bag of 10,000, you can grow a tree that throws bags of 10,000 bells when it grows. If you do this once a day, you must maintain a constant income of 20,000 bells per day, between planting and harvesting your bags of money.

Take advantage of special visits

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Within the first few days of your island adventure, you are likely to encounter a unique visitor, such as Gulliver, the seagull asleep on the beach, or Wisp, the easily scared ghost. Each of these visitors will teach you something, sell you something, or send you on a short mission. These missions will grant you unique item rewards.

My personal favorite visitor so far is C.J., a beaver-blogger who loves to fish. He will ask you to catch special fish for him, to ask for fish decorations for you (from another unique visitor) and to pay you extra for any fish you sell him. In a single day with C.J., I ordered a handful of fish ornaments to be hung on my walls and had almost 60,000 bells fished as usual. It was a good day.

Invite new villagers to your island (and befriend them)

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There are hundreds of potential villagers, all with their own personalities and unique designs, who can move to their island, but their small sample of land can only accommodate 9 at a time. As you build on the barren island at the beginning of the game, choosing your co-residents adds wealth to your personal utopia.

To attract the top three people in town, just buy Nook Miles tickets to other islands from the Nook Stop machine at Resident Services. The first three islands you visit will feature a character excited to join their community. But once you’ve welcomed the first three rookies, Tom Nook will ask you to build a camp, where tourists will stay for one day at a time. Invite campers, and they’ll move to your island, too.

As a bonus, you can buy collectible Amiibo figures or cards of your favorite Nintendo characters online, and they allow you to invite unique villagers with special attributes to your island. As those who have used Amiibo in other Nintendo games know, they are not essential to the main game, but they add small elements to further personalize your experience, and sometimes even cross characters between Nintendo properties.

Finally, make friends with those villagers by talking to them every day, giving them gifts, and mailing them cards (do it at the airport). Not only do you earn Nook Miles by making friends with the villagers, but your new friends will also start giving you more gifts, like clothing and medicine.

Use a stone ax, not an iron one

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If we’ve learned anything in the last few millennia, it’s that iron cuts trees better than stone, right? Well, in Animal Crossing, you may not actually want to cut your trees; You may only want wood, softwood, or hardwood for crafts. Fortunately, the stone ax extracts those types of wood. without cutting down the tree.

Learn how to crawl

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Catching fish takes a little practice, but I didn’t realize I was catching bad mistakes until a few days after the game. Rather than rushing and swinging the net wildly, you can crawl forward by holding down the A button when the net is in hand. Creeping is even more important to insects like tarantulas and scorpions, which will poison you if you get too close. Advance slowly, pause when they enter a defensive position, then continue advancing once they calm down. This will get you close enough to catch a bug before you try to bite it or escape.

Make and use fish bait

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As you go on long, peaceful walks on the beach, you may notice small jets of water gushing from the sand. When you see them, take out your shovel and dig! Manila clams hide under the sand, and you can turn them into bait for fish. When you fish for rare fish, you can use that bait to give yourself better odds, attracting more fish in specific places like mountain streams and at the end of the dock.

Always hold a net while shaking trees

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During your first day or two on the island, when you run around shaky trees to get sticks (how else are you going to build that ax?), Wasp nests will occasionally fall from the branches. If you find yourself on the wrong side of a stinger without medication, you will pass out. However, once you build the bug net, it is a good rule of thumb to always keep it while you are shaking trees. Not only can you catch vengeful wasps, but you can also catch spiders and other creepy crawlers evicted from their homes.

Play at the Stalk Market (once it’s worth it)

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Playing the Stalk Market is a fairly reliable way to increase your weekly income. You can buy turnips on Sundays at Daisy Mae at prices that are generally around 100 bells. For the rest of the week, you can register in the morning and afternoon at Nook’s Cranny store to see the turnip rates. The goal is to buy low and sell high.

Some important notes: turnips rot after a week, so you can’t rack them up waiting for a giant payday. They also rot if you travel back in time. And checking prices twice a day takes time, so you probably don’t want to start investing in turnips until the time is worth it. I don’t invest unless I have at least 50,000 bells. So even a small increase in prices can lead to a significant return. If you want to step up about it, you can even check out the websites fans have built to calculate the trajectory of the Stalk Market during the week.

Organize your island

As you settle into island life, you will begin to develop a daily routine: exploring, collecting, and building. But your routine can be much easier, and requires fewer trips to and from your home to store what you find, if organized efficiently. The easiest way to do this is by planting your fruit trees in well-defined orchards. You can even tag those orchards with custom signs, made using the design app on your Nook phone, as one reader noted in the comments below. Once organized, harvesting fruit in the morning will be quick and profitable, and you can spend all of your time saving exploring, fishing, and collecting shells as you really want.

If you want to get even more organized, you can break stones around the island until they appear close to your home, creating a small patch for easy removal of stone, clay, and iron. Furthermore, planting a flower field not only creates a beautiful space, but will also cause cross-pollination, which brings forth new varieties of flowers.

Keep your eyes in the sky

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At night, shooting stars will occasionally flash across the sky. If you look up and see one, you can press button A to want it. Longing for the stars, the star shards hit the beach the next day, which can help you create unique items like wands.

Pay attention to the morning announcements, because Isabelle will occasionally mention night meteor showers, which are the perfect time to collect a dozen or more stars. Shooting stars also seem to move in packs, so if you see one in the sky, keep looking up for a few seconds; You may get another handful of free wishes. Finally, depending on when you want it in the stars, you can get unique fragments of the zodiac. Only time will tell if these shards combine to create special elements, but I can tell you that is what I wish with every shooting star.

Manufacturing is king (especially on the road)

Creating tools and items from the debris you discover around the island is a great element in the beginning of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and you’ll often want to create while away from home. By keeping a workbench in your inventory at all times, you can drop it anywhere and put your ship down without the hassle of traveling back to your store or home.