Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Secrets Tom Nook doesn’t want you to know
Animal Crossing: New Horizons may appear simplistic, but there are deep mechanics underneath the surface. Here are 8 tips to help you on your new island.
When playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, all of the NPCs have a wealth of knowledge to share with you. Villagers will tell you that there’s a meteor shower that night. Isabelle will give you advice to increase your rating. Tom Nook will let you know how to get more people to come to the island including residents, businesses and a musician who has weirdly become a prima donna since we last saw him.
But despite Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ tranquility and simplicity and despite the wealth of knowledge it hands you, there’s a ton of things bubbling under the surface you might never know you could do if you’re new to the franchise. Let’s dig in.
Eating
By now you’ve learned the obvious stuff. Your town grows fruit and you can sell it for cash. If you grow fruit from other islands, that fruit goes for five times the cash. That’s Animal Crossing 101.
But they’ve added a new mechanic that you can do with the fruit (along with bamboo shoots and some seasonal items like the Bunny Day eggs). You can eat them. Okay, you could eat them in past games too but they’ve added a cool new mechanic.
When you eat something you’ll see a meter that’ll start at 01/10. You can eat up to ten things to fill the meter. This gives you strength. Strength is a great mechanic that allows you to shovel up entire trees or break rocks. This becomes incredibly useful later in the game when you start terraforming your island.
Every time you use a feat of strength it uses up one from your strength meter so if you have a whole orchard of trees to move you should have a lot of fruit handy. This allows you to literally pick up and move an entire tree to wherever you need it to be. If you hit a rock with a shovel while you’re strong, it’ll break. Don’t worry though, after a day or two the rock will regenerate somewhere else. But, this allows you to clear space for rivers or paths.
What if you have extra fruit strength left over and you’re worried about accidentally breaking something? Easy. Sit on a toilet and your character will poop out the rest of the fruit. I’m not kidding.