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Animal Crossing: New Horizons guides

Start smart, make more money, customize characters, increase inventory, and much more in our guides and walkthroughs

All Stories

Animal Crossing: New Horizons brings islands of fun to the Nintendo Switch, and Polygon’s guides will help you make the most of your time in a game that, as we wrote in our review, couldn’t have come at a better time.

Amidst worldwide lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Animal Crossing: New Horizons broke sales records and resonated with the many players who picked it up. The game became a place for people to escape their real-world stresses, to connect with one another virtually (especially for holidays that couldn’t happen in-person, like Halloween and Thanksgiving), to protest injustices, and even to hear about political campaigns. For all of those reasons and more, we chose New Horizons as one of our top games of 2020.

There’s so much on offer in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. We’ve organized our guides into several sections to help you throughout your journey.

Our beginners guides focus on your first several days, teaching you how to pick a good island, tips about where to place your tent, and a helpful list of things you should do every day in New Horizons.

We’ve got a ton about upgrades, too, like how to increase your inventory and upgrade your tools. And don’t miss our guides about the things you can and should do every day to make more money (Bells) — like literally growing money from trees.

If you’re into making money and farming important items like Iron Nuggets (and why wouldn’t you be, honestly?), we’ve got a series of guides for you, too — as well as reference lists of rewards you’ll earn with Nook Miles+ rewards and Nook Mileage rewards (which sound kind of the same but aren’t).

We focus on customization. For characters, you can change your hair and choose among many faces, galleries of which you can see in our guides. For structures, you can move buildings or build bridges and ramps — all of which you can see in our guides, too.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons 2.0 guides

Just when the buzz ended, Nintendo announced the huge 2.0 update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, including the Happy Home Paradise DLC. As the game grew, so did our guides.

From here, we got an expanded farming system, Brewster the barista pigeon, and gyroids. We also got cooking, special islands Kapp’n takes us to, ordinances, and a spot for traveling NPCs to set up shop. Though the 2.0 update can be daunting, we’re here to help.


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