Animal Crossing: New Horizons Best Ways to Farm Bells – Get Lots of Money!

If you're looking to payoff one of your island debts to Tom Nook, then we're looking to help by taking a look at the best methods for farming bells in Animal Crossing: New Horizons! These are specific ways you can gather loads of bells to help you get paid up, furnish your house, or build up your village!

Island Tours for Bugs

This is probably one of the best ways to get a large amount of bells. The only problem with this method is that you might need quite a few Nook Miles to get it to pay off. What you want to do is purchase a Nook Miles Ticket from the Nook Stop (ATM). This will cost you 2,000 Nook Miles, unless you haven't taken a flight yet, because your first flight is free!

You will need to take your flight at NIGHT (after 7PM) and you're looking for an island that either has a bunch of Emperor Butterflies (bright blue-wings) or Tarantulas! There are islands you will occasionally come across that feature a bunch of these that will spawn over and over. You can pretty much fill up your inventory with them if you've got the patience, so make sure to empty your pockets before heading out on your flights.

The best one to find is the Tarantula, and that's because it sells for 8,000 bells each! I've seen players make over 200,000 bells from selling a pockets full of these little buggers. Emperor Butterflies are lucrative as well, they sell for 4,000 bells each.

How to Catch Tarantulas

While the Emperor Butterflies are really easy to catch, the Tarantulas are not so simple! They will lunge and bite you if you aren't careful, so you need to be ready to catch them as quickly as possible. If you do get bitten, however, it's not that big of a deal! You will faint and spawn back near the plane.

To catch them, you need to sneak up to it very slowly. When you get close, you will notice they tense up and look like they're going to pounce. You need to STOP and wait for them to go back to normal. Once they do, take another step closer and repeat. Wait until you're close enough to catch it and then drop the net on top of them!

Bug Spawning Dates

Each of these bugs will only spawn in specific seasons, so here's a look at when you will find them:

• Emperor Butterfly (5pm - 8am): December to March & June to September
• Tarantula (7pm - 4am): November to April

While you're touring these islands, make sure to keep an eye out for any other rare spawns of fruit or flowers. You'll want to collect them and bring them back to your island to start growing them. Pretty much anything that doesn't spawn native to your island would be good to bring back. I would also smack some rocks while you're there as well, you only get a limited amount of collecting from the rocks on your island per day. You can also get lucky and come across an island that has a bunch of money rocks! These rocks will drop coins if you smack them with a shovel or axe, and if you do it repeatedly (keep smacking until it stops spawning cash) you will get higher stacks of bells!

Money Trees

For every new day you play (I have generally found one per day, that might not be the case), you should run around and look for a glowing spot on your island. It will look like this:

Take your shovel and dig up that location. You will receive 1,000 bells for your troubles, and you will also notice that the hole you dug is glowing gold. You can plant bells in this hole and in a few days will most likely have a money tree! I say most likely because it doesn't always sprout a tree that grows money, so this method is a bit of a gamble. Whatever you plant in the hole will be tripled, but this maxes out at 10,000 bells. If you plant anymore than 10,000 you are wasting your bells! To plant bells, you can go into your inventory and scroll over to your bells. Interact with it and it will give you the option to split it into different denominations. Choose whichever you want and then plant it from your inventory!

Nook's Cranny Hot Item

If you get deep enough in the story you will eventually build up a store called Nook's Cranny. This opens up the ability to purchase some limited time items, but it also opens an additional perk to help you sell items for more money. That method is the Hot Item, which you will want to talk to Timmy and Tommy (you can also check the bulletin board right outside the store) about. Each day they will purchase a particular item for double the normal amount of bells. Depending on what the item ends up being, you can make quite a bit of cash from this. Before pursuing this, I would craft one and sell it to make sure it's worth it!

Once you know what item you need, go around farming the materials you need to craft it. If you run out of resources on your island, you can always take a flight using a Nook Miles Ticket to go farm some more of the particular items you need! Once you've gathered everything up, craft all the items and sell them for big profit.

Make sure you sell the items before Nook's Cranny closes! You have to sell hot items directly to Timmy and Tommy, you won't get double the bells if you use the drop box.

Sell Fossils

Fossil locations that can be found under an X on the ground of your island respawn on a daily basis. You can usually get 3 - 5 of these depending on the day. While you can donate them to museum, if you're in need of some serious bells then you can always sell them instead! You still need to go to Blathers to have them identified, but after that you can either donate them to the museum or go ahead and sell them for pretty good money depending on how rare the fossil ends up being!

Sell to C.J. or Flick When Possible

These are both characters that will randomly visit your island. C.J. is a fisherman and will give you additional cash for any fish you sell to him, and Flick is interested in bugs and will give you a boosted rate for any you are able to find. If you encounter either of them on your island, take time out of that day to farm either fish or bugs to make some pretty good money!

If you don't mind doing a bit of exploiting of your game, you can very easily make money by checking out our Animal Crossing: New Horizons Cheats & Glitches post!