How to Make Money in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

With crafting being one of the main features in New Horizons, you’ll be hitting more rocks than ever before. It’s now even more important to learn the tried-and-true tradition of positioning yourself to get the most out of your island’s geography.

Every rock on your island can spit out eight materials per day. Most will be stone, clay, or iron, but you’ll sometimes get gold. Getting eight taps out of each rock is a science, though. The moment you hit a rock for the first time that day, an invisible timer begins to count down — and every time you adjust your angle or move closer, you lose bells.

To ensure you’re not pushed back by enough taps to cost you the final whack, make sure to dig two holes behind you before you start the process. This way, you won’t be pushed back enough to fail a strike, almost guaranteeing you get the best result. Just don’t stop spamming that A button until you’ve wrangled the full 15,000. Also, make sure nothing is blocking the space around the rock before you start, or you can’t get the full amount no matter how fast you tap. So be sure to pick up those weeds or fruit that are sitting next to rocks before you start spamming that A button.

Or, if you get sick of digging two holes for each rock, you can carry a piece of fencing around with you instead. Stand directly above or below each rock, then place fencing behind you and center your character’s back against the fence. If you do it correctly, your character may drift a bit along the fence, but not enough that it’ll move you out of reach of the rock before you get all eight resources. Snag your rewards and fencing, then move on to the next rock!

You won’t know what you’re fishing for until you reel it in. It’s probably a black/sea bass, but it could be something bigger. Something better. But if you’re out fishing in the hopes of reeling in something big, don’t be discouraged by a swarm of bass filling your inventory. Even if a fish or bug isn’t worth a fortune to the Nook twins, that doesn’t mean you should just throw them back to nature. Small sales will add up over time.

If you’re not having much luck finding valuable critters, you may want to change up when you do your daily hunt. Depending on the date, you may find better fish or bugs during a particular time slot. Our monthly fishing guide indicates which fish will only be found in the mornings or evenings, and you can strategize accordingly. For example, some of the most valuable fall fish — snapping turtles, koi, golden trout, and barreleye — can only be found after 4 p.m. or 9 p.m. during the fall in the northern hemisphere.

Also, you may want to take the time to dig up manila clams, which are buried on the beach, and give away their location by squirting out water. You can craft them into fish bait, then stay in one place and reel in one fish after another. Rare fish often appear near the pier, in the river mouth that runs into the ocean, or on the clifftops, but it can be irksome running back and forth from them, waiting for a fish shadow. So bait in some rare gems all at once instead!

By now you’ve noticed a glowing patch of grass somewhere else on your island every day. Dig it up, and you get 1,000 bells. It may not sound like much pocket money, but take another look. That patch is still glowing when you extract the cash.

Step 1: Go to your inventory and remove some bells from your bell pouch. Bury any amount of bells up to 10,000.

Step 2: Wait five or six days and return to the tree to find sacks of bells hanging from it like fruit. You’ll get triple the amount you buried in bells, up to $30,000. Make it a daily chore, and you’ll gain a net 140,000 bells per week.

However, players have been trying a new trick that seems to be working out. Although most players won’t try it, some gamblers will bury 99,000 bells in a hole. For a long time, players thought this risk wasn’t worth it. But if you wait until a day when, during the morning announcements, Isabelle mentions that her astrology said she will be lucky, then it’s time to bury 99,000 bells. It’s the only way you’ll be able to yield 297,000 bells from the money tree.

This isn’t something you’ll do every single day, but it’s one to watch out for at least. Each day, Timmy and Tommy pay double for a certain item. It’s always one you have the DIY recipe for, so you can almost always put this opportunity to good use. We won’t suggest you burn through your supply of iron ore whenever they ask for a table, but it’s a good way to turn any excess or common materials into a decent payday.

You have a lot of trees on your island, so if you’re not using that wood for anything else, why not turn them into a load of benches, chairs, or beds whenever they’re paying out for them?

When you start to learn some more elusive recipes, you can even double the worth of something like gold nuggets. Though you can sell these for 10,000 bells a pop, using one to craft a hot item like the Golden Gears will immediately bump up the return to anywhere over 20,000 bells. That 2x increase can really add up.

When Blathers identifies a duplicate fossil in your inventory, he ponders buying it for his own personal collection. But he won’t. He could have been the Flick or C.J. of the fossil market, but we’re left with only one other option — peddling them off to the Nook twins.

You can find around four to six fossils each day in your town by digging up star-pattern markers. Go get these assessed by Blathers to uncover their true names, donate whatever isn’t in the museum already, and sell the rest. Or just sell them all!

Most fossils are worth a few thousand bells each, so there’s a decent amount of money to be made each day. You can find fossils on Nook Miles Ticket island tours, too, so there’s a bonus incentive to jetting off. More on that a little later.

If this is your first Animal Crossing game, you might have wondered why everyone shared which fruit their island had at the very start. It wasn’t just to shove it in the face of peach fans who had nothing but pears. Every island is assigned one native fruit: peaches, pears, oranges, apples, or cherries. There are coconuts, too, but you’ll find these on virtually any deserted island you visit.

Your island’s native fruit isn’t worth much to the Nook twins. They’re a common sight. But get your hands on any other fruit not native to your island, and you can start to make some good money.

The trick here is to track down these imported fruits and plant them on your island to begin growing more. You can turn one tree’s worth of cherries into three more trees and nine cherries, and the multiplication can just go from there. Some deserted islands will have non-native fruit, and you have an 80% chance any friends’ islands you visit will have a different local fruit. Plus your virtual Mom ships you a non-native fruit shortly after you arrive on the island.

New Horizons loves to reward you for doing the little things to improve your island. Tasks like hitting rocks or catching bugs and fish — which you’ll be doing anyway to make money — earn you miles, as do other tasks for beautifying your island, like planting trees and flowers. We recommend at least completing your first five daily tasks, as they’ll have miles multipliers that make these simple tasks even more valuable. These are essentially daily challenges that require you to complete various tasks around your island. Sometimes they’re as easy as picking flowers, but other times they’re much more difficult.

Step 1: To convert Nook Miles into bells, first head to Resident Services and interact with the Nook Stop Terminal. From here, you’ll have the option to Redeem Nook Miles. Pick the Bell Voucher from this list to redeem. Keep in mind that it costs 500 Nook Miles.

Step 2: Then, make your way to Nook’s Cranny and sell the Bell Voucher for 3,000 bells!

Once you’ve built up a surplus of miles, you can spend 2,000 of them on a valuable Nook Mystery Island tour ticket. Mystery islands can be bell bonanzas (more on them below), but they’re also a time commitment. For more immediate returns, you can spend 500 miles for a 3,000 bell voucher, or earn 12,000 bells for the same price as a single island ticket.

Once you’ve mastered your daily routine and start paying off home upgrades, you’ll want to fill it with more than just DIY tables. But before you spend all your hard-earned bells on Nook’s fanciest furnishings, consider saving them for some of these long-term bell-farming techniques. It pays to be patient if you want to become a bellionaire.

If you’re at all invested in Animal Crossing social media, you’ll know people go nuts when they snag the rarest fish and bugs. Dorados, great white sharks, scorpions, horned Hercules, and the elusive coelacanth are all fine examples of specimens for which Timmy and Tommy will pay a pretty penny.

Nook Miles can buy you everything from furniture to bell vouchers, but trust us: Save your Miles for buying plenty of Nook Miles Tickets. Each Nook Miles Ticket island tour dumps you on a preset island chosen at random, but odds are decent that you’ll find rare resources like bamboo and non-native fruit, rainy weather for coelacanth hunting, extra fossils, and/or more wood and ore from trees and rocks.

Once you visit enough islands, you’ll start to get a thrill once you spot particular layouts, such as the massive circular moat with rocks at its center that signals Money Rock Island.

As the name implies, each of the six rocks is guaranteed to contain bells, meaning if you follow our rock-tapping guide you’ll get a whopping 90,000 bells — not a bad payout for just 2,000 miles.

Or, take a midnight flight and you may find “scorpion island” or “tarantula island,” depending on your season and hemisphere. On these auspicious nights, you’ll find the island only spawns these creepy 8,000-bell bugs, and if one attacks you, you’ll wake up next to the pilot, so you can keep pursuing them until your inventory’s full.

If luck isn’t on your side, then you can use brute force and make a random island into scorpion island. Bugs typically spawn in or on trees, flowers, and rocks, so you can ensure these bugs don’t spawn by removing all trees, stumps, flowers, weeds, and rocks. Now, either tarantulas or scorpions will be the game’s only bug-spawning option (not counting wharf roaches on the beach). You can also leave a couple of palm trees standing, as the beetles that spawn on them tend to be profitable as well.

With everything we’ve listed here, you should be well on your way to Animal Crossing riches. While we’ve given a pretty exhaustive list of tricks for acquiring a fortune, new tips are rolling out every month. Watch out for Nintendo’s game updates, as they usually release one each month or so.