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Where to find Iron Nuggets in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Iron Nuggets are required to make some of the most important tools in the game

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An Animal Crossing villager hits a rock, making rocks and ore pop out Image: Nintendo via Polygon
Julia Lee (she/her) is a guides producer, writing guides for games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Genshin Impact. She helped launch the Rift Herald in 2016.

Within your first few days of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you’ll need Iron Nuggets to craft tools and unlock Nook’s Cranny, the island’s first store, which costs a whopping 30 Iron Nuggets (a scarce resource) to finish building.

You get Iron Nuggets from rocks, which can also spit out stone and clay. (Also, one of the rocks in your town will drop Bells instead of resources.) It’s best to check rocks as soon as you can, so that you have Iron Nuggets when you need them.

Farming Iron Nuggets

To farm Iron Nuggets, hit the rocks around your island with a shovel until they stop spitting out resources. To maximize the amount of loot you get from each rock:

  1. Stand next to a rock, holding your shovel.
  2. Turn around and face away from the rock.
  3. Dig two holes, so that you’re standing between the rock and the holes you dug. (The holes will prevent you from bouncing backward after each hit.)
  4. Hit the rock as many times as you can as quickly as you can.
A gif of an Animal Crossing character hitting a rock and having bells pop out Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

Consider farming resources from all of your rocks every day to gather their resources. If you’ve hit all the rocks in your town and still don’t have enough Iron Nuggets for your craft, then your best bet is to buy a Nook Miles Ticket for 2,000 Nook Miles and set off to one of the randomized islands. There will be plenty of rocks to farm there.

You can also time travel by changing your Nintendo Switch’s date in the settings, if you’re fine with skipping forward to the next day.

The next level of puzzles.

Take a break from your day by playing a puzzle or two! We’ve got SpellTower, Typeshift, crosswords, and more.

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