Beginners Tips Animal Crossing New Horizons

Animal Crossing games are huge games. You can sink many, many hours in them. Unleash your creativity, and play the game just like you want to. Play alone, or together with friends. Set goals for yourself, or go with the flow. It’s your choice.

So, a guide telling you how to do things wouldn’t work for Animal Crossing New Horizons. But what we can do is to put some tips here. Many in our team are playing, and we’ve rounded up some that will make your gameplay more fun.

We’ve already put up some tips on how to get the most our of your Pocket Camp connection and the Switch online app in this article.

Another important tip though is that If you are a Switch Online member, go to the member section of the eShop and there you can download a silk Nook Inc rug. Then in-game you can redeem Nook Miles to get it.

Blathers and his museum

• Once you have made your first fishing rod and bug net, catch those critters and turn them over to Tom Nook. After you give him five of either of them, he gets a call from Blathers. Hooray! Museum on the way, Blathers will pitch his tent the next day. I hope he can sleep with only the flimsy linen cloth between him and the creepy crawlies outside!
• Until Blathers get there, you can store all bugs and fish outside as the tent (and your pockets) are quite cramped.

• On the next day Blathers has arrived. (Not a tip, but will you look at the interior of his tent! I’m always blown away by all the detail Nintendo puts in these games). Bring him another fifteen different bugs/fish/fossils and then the museum will open in a day.
• You’ll need to talk to Blathers to get a recipe for the vaulting pole and shovel so don’t delay! You need both to find your first fossils across the river.
• It’s tempting to sell new fish and insects as some are worth quite a few bells. But it’s advisable to give every new species you catch to Blathers for the museum. Otherwise you have a lot of catch up to do later on.
• If you see a furniture leaf near a tree you haven’t shaken, or the conch shell on the beach, sneak up on them with a net. It might be a walking leaf or hermit crab.

Nook Miles will take you far!

• Visit the ATM in Nooks’ Resident Services every day to get free Nook Miles. An easy way to get more! Eventually you upgrade to Nook Miles + and you are given tasks to do. Which will give you something of a goal!
• You can increase your pocket size by spending Nook Miles+ and buying a Pocket Organizer at 5.000 miles. That may seem a lot but they rack up quickly when you do the tasks.
• Another must have is the tool wheel. It gives you a quick-select wheel to make it easier to get out your shovel, ax, and other handy items.

• If you press the A-button in your inventory, you can pick up stuff and put them in a different place. Always good to organise stuff!
• Hairstyles and hair colour can also be bought with Nook Miles+. You use the mirror or vanity that you need to have in your tent/ home to change them.
• One of the fun things to do with Nook Miles+ is that you can buy Nook Mile tickets. With them you can go to a random island that you can use to get materials, fruit, flowers and you can also meet new animals there.
• Another part of the ATM is to buy items in Nook Shopping. Every day, the store on your island will have new products in stock. And while you may not always want everything, you should still buy anything that you haven’t seen before. Doing this will fill out the catalog in Resident Services. This will enable you to reorder any of the things you previously purchased whenever you want.
• If you’ve connected with Pocket Camp through your My Nintendo account as I mentioned in in this article you can also order the special Pocket Camp items by clicking right on you R-shoulder.

Traveling to other islands and having people over

• Of course, you can travel to another random deserted island using the Nook Mile Ticket mentioned above. Harvest as much as you can there, you can take it all home if your pocket space allows. That island is procedurally generated, so even though it feels wrong to leave a wasteland behind, it’s very helpful in getting materials. Plus, you may meet a cool animal you want to invite over.
• The airport terminal allows for other travel to, to islands of friends, or for friends to come visit you. New Horizons uses your Switch friends list for that. So when you tell the Dodo Airlines you want to fly, it’ll search which of your Switch friends have their gates open. And if you open your gates, only your friends will see your island on their list.
• Finally, you can use the Dodo Code option. This enables you to open up your island with a five-digit code. You can then share this code on social media or in a Discord to invite whoever you want to your island whether they are your friend or not. But you can also limit this code to friends only, by giving it to friends only.

• I think all of us who played the older Animal Crossing games have found themselves in a situation where people accidentally shovelled their way through your flower bed or such. To keep that from happening, you can designate Best Friends on your in-game Nook phone. When you both link as Best Friends you will then get the option to dig up fossils, so to use your shovel. Otherwise, you’ can only shake trees.
• Another cool benefit of being Best Friends is that you can message said friend even when you are not in her town. Do this through your in-phone Nook phone or via the Nintendo Switch Online app on your real life phone. The other person does have to be online.
• One more tip here: do not put furniture in front of the airport as you can’t move it when visitors are in your town.

Recipes and crafting are key

• Gathering recipes is fun. You might get them from the other animals, sometimes from the Nook family or in a bottle on the beach.
• If you mash the A button while crafting you’ll make it go faster (not holding it though)
• Just like in the old game you can get stung by bees. You can get medicine from Timmy. If you don’t and keep on going, the second sting means you will faint. But, talk to one of your animals sporting the stung eye, and you might get a recipe for medicine yourself. The medicine is made out of weeds and beehives.
• Once you get an Axe, you can use it to whack the tree and you get hard and soft wood. Hit rocks with it, and you’ll get ore, gold nugget clay and iron ore. All materials to use in recipes.

• One of the earliest recipes is the one for a crafting table. Very handy to own! You might want to  keep it in your pocket, that way you’ll always have a means to make new tools.
• The flimsy tools you can make at first break after a few uses. With Nook Miles you can also upgrade them. But, beware that tapping a tree with an upgraded one, as it will cut the entire tree down. If you want the third bit of wood without cutting the tree, use a weaker axe.

Materials needed for pretty much everything

• It’s a good idea to gather everything you find. It’s a fine balance of course of needing more bells and gathering materials, but you’ll need a lot of wood, stone, iron etc in future.
• But with crafting you can make materials into items, and get more bells for you buck that way. For instance,  remove weeds, turn them into a leaf umbrella and sell that. Much more profit.
• When you knock down your fruit, or tap the tree for wood or the rocks for materials, weeds can really get in the way. Materials even disappear in them, which is a pity. Make sure bases of trees and rocks are weed free.
• If a villager runs up to talk to you they might have something to give you such as materials towards your latest project.

• You can hit every rock once a day to get materials like small stones, iron, clay and even gold nuggets. The more to hit it in a set amount of time, the more precious the materials are that you get. To make sure you don’t get knocked back every time, you first dig a hole behind you and to one side, effectively locking you in.
• When you get the right recipe, you could also build a fence around the rock where I positioned the holes. Less work in the long run!
• Every day, there will be one rock on your island that is a money rock. A money rock will produce bells when you hit it with a shovel. Go about it in the same way as I described above.
• Did you notice the glowing point appearing in your grass? Dig it up and find 1.000 bells. Other then when you pick up money from the money rock, this bag stays in your inventory. Just go to your inventory with X and press A when your cursor is on the money bag. and choose Put Away
• Rumor has it that when you plant that 1.000 Bells back in the same hole, a money tree will grow.
• When you eat ten fruit in a row you get stronger, being able to break a rock completely!
• Eating 10 fruit even means you can dig up a fully grown tree, which stays intact in your pocket and move it else where. Dig hole, plant and hey presto a fully grown tree got moved.
• The downside of this is that for the 9 other turns, you can use your shovel or in a normal way, the effect has to wear off. But if you have a toilet, you can have your character loose the food the normal way too!

More tips!

• If you pick up flowers from the ground, they turn into a flower in a pot. But if you dig up a flower, you can replant it.
• With a shovel you can dig at the spots on the beach where water is squirting out. If Gulliver is around that’ll give you the parts you need to bring him. If not you’ll get a type of clam that is used in the recipe for fish bait. Fish bait is used to attract a fish to where you are standing.
• Paula was lucky to shoot a balloon down that had bubble gum in it! Bubble gum looks like glasses in your pocket until you wear it.

• Talk to an animal when it’s working on it’s own workbench in their house, and they give you a recipe! Works as well when you are visiting in someone else’s town.