How to Organize an Animal Crossing: New Horizons Turnip Sale

An Animal Crossing: New Horizons turnip sale is a great way to make money without too much effort on your part. If you're keen on bringing in the big bells in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you can take advantage of good turnip prices at your local Nook's Cranny—but organizing such an event can be a trying task. Don't worry—we've got you covered!

But first, let's go for a quick primer on the "Stalk Market." In Animal Crossing: New Horizons (and previous games), an NPC named Daisy-Mae will come to your town every Sunday morning selling turnips at prices around 100 Bells.

Turnips are functionally different from other items in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. They will spoil after a week and become effectively useless, so it's up to you to sell them at the right time. Nook's Cranny will offer to buy them at one price from 8 a.m.–noon local time and at a second price from noon–10 p.m. local time on Monday–Saturday.

The trick here is to sell your turnips not only at a profit, but at as massive a profit as possible. You won't always be able to do this at your own island, either; sometimes you'll have to visit someone else.

Trying to sell your turnips on someone else's island is a special kind of hell, but sometimes you'll be lucky enough to have high prices on your own island. While this is certainly great for your own turnips, you can potentially bring in even more money by inviting people to your island. That, however, can be a daunting challenge, so I'll break down the best way I've found to do it.

Monitoring and Predicting Your Turnip Prices

Your first step towards running an Animal Crossing turnip sale is simple: pay attention to your turnip prices. Checking Nook's Cranny twice a day is easy as pie. Predicting where your prices will go is another matter entirely.

There are a fair few websites out there that claim to predict turnip prices, but I've found Turnip Prophet to be one of the easiest to use. It simply needs four pieces of information from you to predict your prices:

1. Are you a first-time turnip buyer?
2. What pattern did you have last week? (More on this below.)
3. What did you buy turnips for?
4. What was the turnip price at Nook's Cranny every day?

Figuring out your pattern is difficult to do if you don't understand the mechanics of the Stalk Market. There are four kinds of patterns:

• Fluctuating
• Small Spike
• Large Spike
• Decreasing

As the week goes on, Turnip Prophet will predict which pattern you have with greater and greater accuracy. Once the week is done (and assuming you've entered all of the data correctly), you can be pretty sure of what your pattern was for the week and use that information to get more accurate predictions for the following week.

Getting an idea of your potential prices in advance can be helpful, but the only thing that ultimately matters is having a high price. If the Nooks are buying turnips for 400 Bells or more—especially in the afternoon—then it can be very profitable to run an Animal Crossing turnip sale!

Why You Should Run an Animal Crossing Turnip Sale

This whole thing is going to be an awful lot of trouble and that leaves us with a question: Why would you invite people to your island in the first place? The answer: Tips.

Traditionally, people leave a tip for a service, usually around 10% (but sometimes more or less). That means that if someone makes 1.8 million Bells selling turnips, you might get a couple fat bags of Bells, a DIY you don't have, an item, a Nook Miles Ticket, or something else entirely.

I used the method I'm about to describe in Mid-May 2020 via the /r/acturnips subreddit. In total, I netted tips valued at around 3.5 million bells in just two hours. I could have made even more, but I didn't have the time.

If the idea of tantalizing profits for an hour or two of chatting with people online is appealing to you, read on and learn how to do an Animal Crossing turnip sale the right way!

Prepping For An Animal Crossing Turnip Sale

Before you run your Animal Crossing turnip sale, you're going to need to do some preparation.

Let's get one thing out of the way: if you're thinking about posting a Dodo Code on Twitter and just let everyone come and go, this is a really bad idea. All of the joining and leaving is going to massively slow down the flow of island visitors, rapidly turning the whole thing into a chaotic mess. You're going to need to be more organized than that. The following method has that covered and uses free web tools to get it done.

Before you even begin, you should figure out where you're going to host your Animal Crossing turnip sale. Most gaming communities—Reddit, Facebook, etc.—have places to run sales, but they also have specific rules as to how these events should be run. Make sure you follow those first and foremost or you'll end up banned!

Step 1 - Create a Google Form

First, you're going to want to create a free Google Form. You'll need this to organize things with your prospective customers. You'll also need it to thwart bots, because yes, there are actually people running bots to try and find good turnip prices.

Your form should ask at least five distinct questions:

1. What is your username?
   • You're going to want to know the username of someone depending on the platform (their Reddit username, their Twitter handle, a forum name, etc.).
2. What is your character's name?
   • You'll want to know the name of a person's character so you can check it as they fly in.
3. What is the name of your island?
   • As with question #2, you want this additional piece of identifying information.
4. How many trips will you need?
   • Yes, some people will buy more than a full inventory of turnips (4,000) and may need to make multiple trips. Asking for the number of planned trips helps in advance.
5. [One more unique question to thwart bots]
   • Botting is a thing, so you want to prevent bots from filling out your form by asking one or more special questions that can't easily be answered by A.I. You can then disregard any questions that aren't answered correctly as possible bots.

Step 2 - Enable the Google Sheets output

Next, you're going to need to enable Google Sheets to collect responses. This is very easy to do:

1. Preview your form.
2. Go to the "Responses" tab.
3. Click the Google sheets icon (the green square with a white cross) to create a spreadsheet for responses.
4. Create a new spreadsheet.

After a short delay, a spreadsheet will pop up with your responses. In addition to the automatic fields (one for a timestamp, and one for each of your questions), you're going to want to add two more columns: Group and Status.

Your spreadsheet should look something like this (minus the example data I've filled in, of course):

"Group" is for organizing people into Groups (e.g. "Group 1," "Group 2," etc.). If you're dealing with a large number of people, you'll want to organize them into multiple groups and handle one group at a time.

"Status" is to keep everyone watching the spreadsheet updated. I used the following statuses:

• Chatting/Message Sent
• Arriving
• On Island/Selling
• Done
• No Response

After this is all done, you want to write a description in the form and paste a public link to the spreadsheet (make sure sharing is enabled!) in there.

The idea here is that people will monitor the spreadsheet to see where their place in line is. When their turn is up, you contact them privately, give them the Dodo Code, and have one or more people leave.

Step 3 - Wait for Good Turnip Prices

Now that you're all set up, you're going to need to wait for some good turnip prices. You can roughly predict them with Turnip Prophet, but you won't know for certain until you actually see them.

There is also the consideration of the two time windows. The morning turnip price lasts for four hours, which might not be enough time to run an Animal Crossing turnip sale. The later window may be a better choice, as long as your prices are attractive.

Step 4 - Protect Your Island

If you've never had a ton of visitors to your island, there is a lot to be worried about. Visitors who are not your friends can still vandalize your island in a number of ways.

One of the most obvious sources of vandalism is trampling your flowers. Anyone can run over them and revert them back to an earlier state, costing you several days' worth of growing.

Another less obvious (but still possible) method is people with rude player or island names talking to your villagers. It can be annoying to see offensive or upsetting names pop up again and again when you talk to your villagers.

Finally—and perhaps most critically—anyone can pick up any item on the ground. You might have some DIYs on the floor in your house or some fruit that you haven't picked up just yet. If you can walk to it, so can they.

All of these reasons are why you should build some fences and block off your island. Make a path directly from the airport to Nook's Cranny, and leave a large area outside of Nook's Cranny where people can drop tips or otherwise assemble. If you're asking people to stick around until an entire group is done, it would be polite to provide some seating and perhaps some entertainment like a Colorful Wheel.

Step 5 - Final Considerations Before Advertising Your Sale

Your final step is to advertise your Animal Crossing turnip sale on your forum or social media of choice. Before you do, you're going to need to be aware of a few things:

1. I cannot emphasize this enough: Ffollow the rules of wherever you're posting this sale! If it's a forum like Reddit or a different place, make sure that you follow along with any rules or policies they may have. Getting banned because you broke a rule sucks (and it also ruins any potential for repeat business).
2. Be aware that you are making a commitment. People will be upset if they cannot sell their turnips because you gave up. Make sure you set clear expectations like "I'll be inviting people for one hour only" or "I'll invite everyone I can until Nook's Cranny closes in three hours."
3. Set clear rules from the outset. If you're going to take people in groups, emphasize that people do not leave via the airport until everyone is done selling!
4. Emphasize that no one gives out the Dodo Code for your island. Inform them that if they do, you will close down the session.
5. Be clear whether you're running this for one person at a time or with groups!
6. Lastly (and most importantly), do not tolerate anyone being disruptive. If there's a problem—someone gave out the code, someone trashed your island, whatever—immediately close out the session using the - button and figure out what to do with those who didn't get to complete their sales.

Running the Sale and Making Bank

The time has come! You've laid all the groundwork, you have your Google Form ready, and you're ready to post a thread, a tweet, or whatever! Now comes the time of actually running the sale (and hopefully collecting some tips).

After you've posted your announcement and your Google Form has gone live, you'll be seeing people start to pop up on the list. Organize them into groups (if you're using them) and message each group to come in using an appropriate form of group chat.

As each group arrives, they'll sell their turnips and possibly leave you a tip when they're done. If you've (wisely) asked them to wait around, just chill out until everyone is done. Once they are, double-check that everyone is finished if you'd like to and then close out the session.

From there, all you have to do is go through all of the people (or groups) until you've decided you've had enough. You might be at it for a while, though, as an Animal Crossing turnip sale can be a very profitable endeavor.