How To Speed Up The Development Of Your Island In ACNH

Summary

• Develop your island efficiently in Animal Crossing: New Horizons by implementing a few of these handy tips.
• For instance, you can speed up progress by adjusting your system’s clock to unlock events and items quicker.
• You’ll want to improve your island rating to attract music star K.K. Slider and unlock rewards like the golden watering can.

The first few days of Animal Crossing: New Horizons are a bit slow and you’ll have less freedom than the game typically offers. This is because you’ll have to build a museum, multiple resident houses, a town hall, a campsite, and more in order to fully finish the main story.

Many of these upgrades take a day or two, meaning you’ll spend a lot of time looking for things to do elsewhere. If you’re looking to speed up the process of getting everything ready, here are a few tips to help you make the most of the first week or so.

Updated January 12, 2025, by Marissa Fiore: After launching in 2020, Animal Crossing: New Horizons has continued to bring joy to players; both those playing from the very beginning and those who have only recently picked up the title. ​​​With that, this list has been updated to include more ways to build up your island in the early days quickly, as well as tips that bring you closer to achieving Project K.K.

23

Utilize Nookazon

As soon as you complete your first couple of days in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the airport opens up, allowing you to visit friends as well as other players you haven’t met yet. In order to trade for items, villagers, and even services, you can visit Nookazon and connect with people all over the world.

While you can purchase things for bells or Nook Miles tickets, people often offer things for free, including duplicates of DIY recipes. This can firmly plant your feet on the ground in the beginning by allowing you to grab the resources and decorations that you want, or even get help with watering plants, gathering different fruits and veggies, and pulling weeds.

While many Animal Crossing players like to include weeds in their island decorating, weeds will lower your island rating, so leave them only if you’re not planning on meeting Isabelle’s expectations.

Much of your island’s development will stem from using tools; from digging for items and wealth, to watering plants, to terraforming the island itself. To do this most effectively, you’ll want to invest in the Pretty Good Tools Recipes, which can be had for 3,000 Nook Miles by redeeming Nook Miles from the Nook Stop booth.

This includes recipes for more sturdy versions of the fishing rod, axe, shovel, net, and watering can, which vary from 30 to one hundred uses before busting. With these at your disposal, you can build, plunder, and decorate your island quicker and more resourcefully. This is because there will be fewer item breaks, and less time spent on crafting new ones.

21

Emphasize Cooking Recipes

Many tend to shy away from cooking in New Horizons, as cooking recipes can be more involved, and most of the food items aren’t too practical. Yet, spending time on this craft can be subtly effective in aiding your avatar directly, while also having more indirect benefits.

For one, you can boost yourself by eating food and adding to your energy point gauge, allowing you to gather resources and work harder. But you can also make other Villagers happy by gifting them food without cluttering their homes. Finally, you can display food items directly, which adds to the inviting decor of your island.

Eating one of these prepared dishes will completely fill your energy gauge. Meanwhile, fruits will only give you one point for each one that you eat. So if you have a lot of hard work that needs to be done, carry some meals with you instead of eating every fruit in sight.

20

Time Travel By Adjusting The System Clock

While there are plenty of ways to make progress within the game’s built-in rules, this technique allows you to exploit the in-game clock by dialing it ahead, essentially time-traveling in the game.

To execute this, open system settings in the Switch menu, then go to system, date and time. Be sure to disable “synchronize clock via internet” if that function is on. Finally, adjust the current clock’s date and time setting. You can push the clock forward months or even years, which will drastically advance the time in New Horizons. This will allow certain events to arrive far sooner, plants will grow quicker, and new items and features (like new fish) will be accessible on demand.

19

Fill Your Island With Residents

As you progress through the early days, eventually, Tom Nook will talk about selling plots of land to fill with residents. An increased population makes your island more attractive to visitors like K.K., and it will also help your island’s rating and thus, your island’s beautification.

The best way to go about this is to build one plot of land at a time. Then you can use any of your Nook Miles tickets to visit islands and find the villagers you want to move to your island. While you don’t have to partake in Villager Hunting as it’s called, it gives you some control over who moves in. However, you can also ignore the plots and they will fill naturally.

Villager Hunting refers to players that spend a great number of Nook Miles tickets to find the villagers they want. To amass Nook Miles tickets, you can sell items on Nookazon or visit a Treasure Island. Otherwise, wait to sell plots until you have enough Nook Miles to buy the tickets you want.

18

Visit Treasure Islands

With the popularity of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a different kind of island has been created by fans known as Treasure Islands. These are heavily modded islands that can spawn any item in the game for players to come, grab, and take back to their own homes.

This is an incredibly helpful resource if you are restarting your island, because you can quickly gather all the materials and furniture you need to start to build the shops and homes that are required to get your island to a three-star rating.

17

Improve Your Island Rating

While New Horizons doesn’t quite have a true “endpoint”, the closest approximation is bringing up your island rating to at least three stars, which will summon K.K. Slider to play a concert in the village square.

Many completionists will want to drive this up even higher, to the five-star maximum rating. At this point, Isabelle will grant you rewards, including a DIY recipe for the golden watering can. Doing tasks like decorating your island with plants, as well as gathering weeds, will work towards this goal.

16

Place Items Everywhere

Struggling to hit three stars on your island rating? It might sound like this would make things worse, but start placing items everywhere. It doesn’t really matter what it is. You can display sea creatures and bugs, DIY items, and small and large things you’ve purchased. Grab a pocket full of stuff and place it around your island.

No matter how it looks, this will help increase your island’s rating, because these things all count toward decorating your island. These items don’t need to remain in these locations for long. Just long enough for you to get Isabelle’s blessing and K.K.’s interest in your island.

15

Go To Work With Happy Home Paradise

Accompanying the free 2.0 update that launched in November of 2021 was a paid DLC titled Happy Home Paradise. This was New Horizon’s answer to Happy Home Designer, which unlocked an entirely new area filled with islands. Animal villagers then show up and request that you build them their own island escape by requesting a theme and certain furniture items.

Not only did this add a nice side story to the game, it also allows you to unlock new ways to decorate your home and those of the villagers living back on your island. Plus, items can be purchased from Happy Home Paradise that you can bring to and set up on your island to help boost your overall rating.

Although Happy Home Paradise is a paid DLC, those with an active Nintendo Switch Online membership can download the DLC for free and play it in its entirety.

14

Earn Nook Miles And Miles +

New Horizons cleverly implements a sort of Achievement or Trophy system via Nook Miles. However, this feature actually rewards you in-game while giving you fun tasks and goals to strive for. Tackling jobs like catching a certain amount of fish or talking to neighbors will grant Nook Miles, which are highly useful.

These can in turn be used at the Nook Stop terminal, which offers everything from exclusive items to DIY recipes and custom designs. You can further exploit this feature by focusing on Nook Miles + tasks, which will often give you double the rewards.

13

Collect And Save Materials

The crafting system in New Horizons gives you the ability to make a wide variety of furniture, decor, and even buildings. But, the ingredients are often less plentiful than you would hope. Keep your extra wood and ores in storage, because you’ll need a ton of them to make it through all the upgrades and crafting you can do.

Head to Nook Miles Mystery Tour islands to farm even more ore and gather other resources. These islands disappear after you leave them, so make sure you pillage and loot everything you find. And keep in mind, the environments are refreshed with new resources and items of some kind every day, so be sure to revisit the game frequently and continue gathering new goods.

It takes 30 of each kind of wood and 30 iron to build Nook’s Cranny. You will also need a lot of wood, stone, and other materials to build three of the villagers’ homes. So, anytime you don’t know what to do, start collecting and saving these DIY materials.

12

Collect All Flower Types

One of the things you will need to add to your island to gain a three-star rating is flowers. Lots of flowers. The game doesn’t really grade you based on the type of flowers you collect or by their color, but it is an easy excuse you can give yourself for trying to breed or find new flowers to add to your natural flora.

Flower breeding can be very difficult to navigate without the use of a guide, but thanks to the ability to travel to the islands of others, you can get help with finding and collecting those pesky and elusive flowers, like the black rose. Plus, having all the flower types available to you can help with decisions about how you want to decorate your island.

11

Dig Up Daily Fossils

It may not sound like it would link directly to your island development, but it does in more ways than one. The most obvious connection is that you can donate fossils to your museum, allowing it to upgrade once you’ve given Blathers a total of 20 donations.

The other way you can use fossils to help develop your island is to place fossils as decorations. It doesn’t really matter how or which fossils you use. From smaller items like Amber to the big, multi-piece fossils like the T. Rex, placing them around your island helps your star rating.

If you want to fully upgrade your Museum to include the Art Wing, you will have to wait for Redd to visit your island and purchase a real painting or statue from him. Once it arrives in the mail, give it to Blathers and he will announce that he can now build on the additional gallery upstairs.

10

Talk To Your Villagers

The entire point of the Animal Crossing series is to hang out and get to know your residents. This can often get lost in the hustle and bustle of making money and upgrading the town, but be sure to not lose track of your villagers in the first few days amidst all the other tasks on your plate.

Chatting with your villagers doesn’t just make your friendship stronger — most villagers will also send you gifts and offer help in various ways. Nook Miles can also be earned at times for talking to your residents. You can additionally add to your island’s population by speaking with the villagers of other islands via Mystery Tours and convincing them to move to your island.

9

Spend Bells To Upgrade Shops

So, eventually, Timmy and Tommy decide to start up a store together. And they build a little shack with the materials you provide them in the early days of the game. Similarly, Mabel will start selling clothes, but only in the center of Residents Services. However, once you start buying items from them, you will get ever closer to the boys and able sisters building bigger shops.

For the Able Sisters, you have to spend 5,000 bells as well as hit a few other requirements. For Nook’s Cranny, however, you will have to buy and sell at least 200,000 bells worth of goods, along with hitting a few other requirements for them too. While that is a lot of cash early on, these are goals you can keep in mind to work toward that will help your island’s rating. Not to mention, this opens up your island to better items and clothing options.

8

Visit Friends’ Islands

While there is no shortage of things to do in single-player mode, you can really speed things up by utilizing some real-life friends. Visiting other players has a ton of benefits, including giving you access to items (especially new fruit) you might not have on your island, or introducing you to new villagers you haven’t met before.

If you make friends in the opposite hemisphere from your own, you’ll also have access to different bugs and fish, which means you can fill that museum faster and even sometimes make a profit. You’ll also earn Nook Miles by visiting other players.

7

Buy The Pocket Organization Guide

One ongoing blemish of the Animal Crossing series has been juggling many items with limited inventory space. Stacking items together or swapping out what you’re carrying can be quite a pain, and this somewhat persists in New Horizons. Luckily, you can now purchase not one, but two upgrades to your inventory, expanding it to a massive 40-item bag.

You’ll be able to purchase the Pocket Organization Guide in the first couple of days, which will add the first additional row of ten. Once your town hall is built, you’ll gain access to another expansion, doubling your inventory from its original size. While subtle, this will go a long way in adding to your efficiency and speed in making things happen on your island.

While decorating or making changes around your island, carry a DIY Workbench and a Trash Can with you. Then, if you need to make tools or throw weeds and excess flowers away, you have everything you need while only taking up two inventory slots. You can also carry a Storage Shed to access your home inventory at any time.

6

Collect From The Money Rock And Money Tree

Every day, the rocks around your island will refresh and drop more ore, clay, and stone. But, each day, one of these rocks will contain a ton of Bells that you can simply pick up and add to your wallet. Make sure you find this rock daily because it gives you a few thousand Bells for free.

You can build fences or dig holes near the rock to stop your character from bouncing backward, meaning you’ll get every hit in before the timer is up. Be sure not to eat fruit beforehand, because after enough is consumed, you’ll smash the rock in one hit. Additionally, it’s a good idea to plant Money Trees. This can be done by simply planting a bag of Bells and watering it as you would any other type of tree.

5

Spend Ample Time Fishing

Fishing in Animal Crossing isn’t just super relaxing, it’s also profitable. Even the lowest-priced fish sell for a couple of hundred Bells, meaning you can spend a bit of time on the beach and turn some huge profits.

Take a look to see which fish will spawn in your hemisphere at certain times or under certain weather conditions, and you’ll soon be on the hunt for the most profitable among them. Some of the better catches are sharks, Stringfish, Blue Marlin, and Sturgeon. Watch out though, some of these species migrate based on the time of year.

Do you hate opening your inventory to grab the required tool every time you do something? Then you should find the tool ring to be a particularly handy feature. Available for the price of 800 Nook Miles, this item allows you to use your D-pad buttons to swap between your various tools. You can even swap where they appear on the ring by pressing X to remove and register.

The tool ring becomes available in the first couple of days from the Nook Services Terminal. Make it one of your first purchases, and you’ll be happy you did.