The first few days of Animal Crossing: New Horizons are a bit slow and you’ll have less freedom than the game typically offers. This is because you’ll have to build a museum, multiple resident houses, a town hall, a campsite, and more in order to fully finish the main story.
Many of these upgrades take a day or two, meaning you’ll spend a lot of time looking for things to do elsewhere. If you’re looking to speed up the process of getting everything ready, here are a few tips to help you make the most of the first week or so.
10 Save Materials
The new crafting system in New Horizons gives you the ability to make a ton of furniture, decor, and even buildings. But, the ingredients are often less plentiful than you would hope. Keep your extra wood and ores in storage, because you’ll need a ton of them to make it through all the upgrades and crafting you can do.
Head to Nook Miles islands to farm even more ore and other resources. These islands disappear after you leave them, so make sure you pillage and loot everything you find.
9 Talk To Your Villagers
The entire point of the Animal Crossing series is to hang out and get to know your residents. This can often get lost in the hustle and bustle of making money and upgrading the town. But, be sure to not lose track of your villagers in the first few days amidst all the other tasks on your plate.
Chatting with your villagers doesn’t just make your friendship stronger — most villagers will also send you gifts and offer help in a variety of ways. Also, Nook Miles can be earned at times for talking to your residents.
8 Make Friends
While there is a ton to do on your own in singleplayer mode, you can really speed things up by making some real-life friends. Visiting other players has a ton of benefits, including giving you access to items or you might not have on your island, or introducing you to new villagers you haven’t met before.
If you make friends in the opposite hemisphere from your own, you’ll also have access to different bugs and fish, which means you can fill that museum faster and even sometimes make a profit. You’ll also earn Nook Miles by visiting other players.
7 Buy the Pocket Organization Guide
One main difficulty of the Animal Crossing series has always been the limited inventory space. Stacking items together or swapping out what you’re carrying is a giant pain, and it continues to be in this game at times as well. Luckily, you can now purchase not one, but two upgrades to your inventory, expanding it to a massive forty-item bag.
You’ll be able to purchase the Pocket Organization Guide in the first couple of days, which will add the first additional row of 10. Once your town hall is built, you’ll gain access to another expansion, doubling your inventory from its original size.
6 Look For The Money Rock
Every day, the rocks around your island will “refresh” and drop more ore, clay, and stone. But, each day, one of these rocks will contain a ton of bells that you can simply pick up and add to your wallet. Make sure you find this rock daily because it gives you a few thousand bells for free.
You can build fences or dig holes near the rock to stop your character from bouncing backward, meaning you’ll get every hit in before the timer is up. Be sure to not eat fruit beforehand, because after enough is consumed, you’ll smash the rock in one hit.
5 Go Fishing
Fishing in Animal Crossing isn’t just super-relaxing, it’s also profitable. Even the lowest-priced fish sell for a couple of hundred bells, meaning you can spend a bit of time on the beach and turn some huge profits.
Take a look to see which fish will spawn in your hemisphere at certain times or under certain weather conditions, and you’ll soon be on the hunt for the most profitable among them. Some of the better catches are sharks, Stringfish, Blue Marlin, and Sturgeon. Watch out though, some of these species migrate based on the time of year.
4 Tool Ring
Do you hate opening your inventory to grab the required tool every time you do something? Then the tool ring is the perfect item for you. Available for the price of a handful of Nook Miles, this item allows you to use your directional-pad buttons to swap between your various tools. You can even swap where they appear on the ring by pressing X to remove and register.
The tool ring becomes available in the first couple of days from the Nook Services Terminal. Make it one of your first purchases, and you’ll be happy you did.
3 Visit Nook Mile Islands
For the low price of 2,000 Nook Miles, you can grab a ticket to a randomly-generated island with various resources on it. There are a ton of different islands that you can find, and each of them has a lot of stuff for you to grab for your own use.
The most basic of these islands offer wood, some fruit, maybe some flowers you don’t have yet, a few rocks, and some fish and bugs. But, there are special islands that only spawn the ever-profitable tarantulas, bamboo trees, and much more. Make sure you grab everything you can hold before you leave to get your Nook Miles’ worth.
2 Watch The Time
While real life’s new day starts at midnight, a new day in Animal Crossing “starts” at 5 a.m. This means that any type of project that will be ready the following day will be ready at 5 a.m. sharp, even if you complete that project at 4:55 a.m.
You can take advantage of this by ensuring you finish something before that 5 a.m. mark. Just make sure you’re not staying up too late playing Animal Crossing — the time in real life seems to fly by when you are.
1 Sell Fruit
There isn’t much in the world of Animal Crossing that is as reliable as fruit. Your native fruit will continuously grow on your island, giving you access to a solid stream of bells if you decide to sell it.
But, you can exploit the native fruit perk for serious gain. After you make a friend with a different native fruit, you can plant one of their’s on your island and earn some mega bells. Also, bring stacks of your fruit to their island — they’ll sell for a ton more there. Make sure you hang on to a couple of your own, as you’ll need them to make certain furniture for one of your first few resident houses.
NEXT: 15 Games To Play If You Love Animal Crossing
