Want to make mining easier in Animal Crossing: New Horizons? Here’s how you can make your very own quarry.
Mining in New Horizons isn’t like mining in most games. Rather than digging into the ground or carefully excavating gemstones, all you need to do is hit a rock with an ax or a shovel. Do it enough and materials start popping out like clay, iron nuggets, or sometimes gold.
That said, mining is tougher than it looks. Rocks don’t appear in logical places on your island. In fact, they can spawn randomly pretty much anywhere there is enough space for a rock to fit. This can make just coming across a rock far more difficult than the mining itself.
But there is a way to make mining a lot easier, and it involves cheesing New Horizon’s systems. Reddit user JovialRS can take credit for setting up a quarry that ensures all rocks always spawn in the same space.
To understand how to make a quarry first we have to understand how rocks spawn. A rock can spawn anywhere on the island where there are at least 3x3 tiles of free space. Dirt and gravel paths don’t seem to obstruct this spawning, but everything else–from trees to rivers to cliffsides–does.
JovialRS had the brilliant idea to manipulate the rock spawn locations by terraforming their island. They basically changed the island so that the only flat space larger than 3x3 was in a single hole in the ground. This ensured that all rocks would always spawn inside the quarry and never anywhere else.
Obviously, quarry-building is only available to late-game players that have unlocked the terraforming options. Also, terraforming your entire island so that there aren’t any 3x3 spaces will take a long freaking time, as we see in JovialRS’s follow up image here.
However, if you’re going to be spending a lot of time in New Horizons (and let’s be honest, you probably are), then it might be worth your time to spend a weekend changing your island so that rocks only spawn in one spot.
Source: Reddit
