How to Get Back Into Animal Crossing: New Horizons

So you just got the Happy Home Paradise DLC for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. You’ve squashed all the cockroaches in your house, talked to all your villagers after abandoning them for months, and picked up every shell, weed, and twig you can find. Well, now what are you supposed to do? How the heck do you do anything in this game in the first place? Here’s a refresher course on Animal Crossing: New Horizons so you can get back to giving Tom Nook every single bell you own.

Ring a Bell?

Cooking in Animal Crossing: New Horizons looks great, and you want a new room in your house for a kitchen, but it turns out you haven’t paid off your last loan yet. How do you get that bread?

It turns out that the tarantula exploits have been patched, so you have to rely on more conventional means to rake in some dough. 

You can bust out your good ol’ net and fishing rod and go catch some bugs and fish. You can sell these to Timmy and Tommy at Nook’s Cranny, or if you have Flick or CJ on your island, they’ll buy it for a profit. If you have clumps of weeds left from cleaning up your island, you can sell them to Leif if he’s on your island, or if you have him on Harv’s island.

There’s also other stuff that earns you a pretty penny, such as fruits that are non-native to your island, and fossils that have been analyzed by Blathers. Nook’s Cranny will also have a ‘hot item’ of the day posted outside the store, or you can ask Timmy or Tommy. These will sell for a huge profit, so make sure to look out for them.

One of the rocks on your island will be a "money rock." By hitting it repeatedly with a shovel or stone axe, it’ll give you some good coins. There’s also a "gold spot" you’ll find somewhere on your island. After digging at it with a shovel, you’ll get a sizeable bag of bells. Even better, if you plant 10,000 bells at that same spot, it will grow into a bell tree which will give you three times the bells you planted.

Of course, all of these will give you bells in the thousands, but what about millions? Every Sunday, Daisy Mae will show up to your island to sell turnips. Buy turnips from her at a low enough price and sell them at a profit. On every day except Sunday, you can check in at Nook’s Cranny and ask for the turnip price. You can also visit a friend and ask for the turnip price on their island. Or, if you’re lonely like me and have no one to play Animal Crossing with, you can join an Animal Crossing Discord server and ask around for turnip prices.

Walk a Mile for Some Miles

Make sure to access the Nook Stop terminal at Resident Services to get 50 Nook Miles. The more days you stop by in a row, the more bonus miles you’ll get. Nook Miles can be used at the Nook Stop kiosk to redeem items you won’t be able to shop for regularly. It’s also how you pay your fare when you go on a Mystery Tour with Kapp’n.

Another way to get Nook Miles is through the Nook Miles+. If you’ve paid off your vacation fee and built your house, you should have Nook Miles+ unlocked. Go to the Nook Miles+ app on your phone. Hit the ‘+’ button and your Nook Miles+ tasks will show up. Upon completing these, you can collect Nook Miles from the app. There isn’t any limit on how many you can do in a day, but the first five tasks are usually worth more miles.

The first flight of the day that you take through Dodo Airlines will also give you a few Nook Miles.

Collect Seasonal Items

Each season has its own particular materials that can only be found during that Animal Crossing: New Horizons season. Since it’s November at the time of publication, if you’re playing in the Northern hemisphere, shaking trees will occasionally give you pine cones or acorns. You’ll also find a variety of mushrooms growing on the ground, and even in digging spots. During the second half of November, maple leaves will fall between the 16th and 25th. These can be used to craft fall recipes. 

Similarly, you’ll find other limited-time items during the rest of the seasons.

Keep Your Island Clean and Green

In order to get the "perfect" island status, you’ll need to make sure you have a 5-star rating. Once you achieve a 5-star rating, Isabelle will give you a recipe for a gold watering can, and you’ll also have lilies of the valley grow on your island from time to time. In order to keep your island’s rating high, make sure there aren’t any items lying around on your island, such as DIYs or dropped furniture and clothing. 

Other than that, you have to ensure you have enough fencing and outdoor objects on your island. Having a lot of the Nook Mile Rewards items on your island will boost your eval points, so having a lighthouse or two won’t hurt. 

It also helps to have plenty of greenery on your island, except for weeds. If you’re too lazy to tackle them all, ask Leif on Harv’s island about his weed clean-up service. Instead, having plenty of flowers, especially hybrids, adds more to your island rating. Hybrids are more likely to grow when two different colored flowers of the same variety are placed next to each other and watered. More flowers are likely to grow when they are watered in general. Having lots of trees helps too, but make sure there aren’t too many either. Even that can cause your rating to fall.

Have Fun

The most important part is to just have fun! You can even throw all this advice out the window and just play how you want. Create an island made entirely of blue flowers or even toilet seats. The whole island is your oyster.