If your trees are not growing in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, here’s how to grow healthy trees, earning you big bucks in no time.
Fruit trees are a standard means of earning consistent money in every Animal Crossing installment. However, if you’re new to the game, you may notice that your trees are not growing in certain situations. You can also grow a money tree! (Yes, yes! Money can grow on trees!)
Along with harvesting fruit, there are some neat tree tricks you can utilize daily to earn more bells. Here’s how to fix your trees that are not growing, and how to maximize your bell return.
If you’re new to the series, there are some important rules for growing trees and harvesting them for their daily spawns. The Animal Crossing world is a vast one, but once you get the basics down, mastering your daily check-ins becomes second nature.
How to grow trees in ‘Animal Crossing’
Give the trees space to breathe
Are your trees not growing in Animal Crossing: New Horizons? The first thing to know about growing trees in Animal Crossing is that you have to leave at least one tile (a space you can walk on) between each tree. If you crowd your trees one after another, they will stay small forever.
Another thing to note about growing trees is that they don’t like being right next to bodies of water or cliffs. Make sure you leave a few spaces between your trees and the edges of the map so that your trees can grow healthy and strong.
It takes three days from when you plant a tree for it to fully grow. You’ll know that a tree isn’t going to grow if it is still tiny the day after you’ve planted it.
You do not need to water trees in Animal Crossing. They will slowly but surely grow on their own without having to use your watering can. (Same goes for flowers and bushes.)
How to grow a money tree in ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’
Another standard feature of the Animal Crossing games are money trees. Every day, you’ll find a glowing spot somewhere on your island. Dig it up to earn a cool 1k bell pouch.
If you want to take your earnings a little further, consider burying some money to grow a money tree. Before closing up the hole, simply bury 10k for a nearly guaranteed 30k return in three days’ time.
To take a little bit of a risk, you can bury 30k bells instead of 10k. While the risk of it not yielding three 30k bell pouches is a little bit higher, half of the fun of Animal Crossing lies in the risk-taking. Keep a steady stream of daily money trees going for a steady cash flow.
Unfortunately, money trees only bear bags of bells once before they revert back to being a normal tree. Before they’ve produced the money bags, you can still move them somewhere else without losing their special money tree status.
If your money tree isn’t growing in Animal Crossing, make sure you apply the rules we shared above: Keep your trees away from other trees, cliffs, and rivers.
How to dig up trees in ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’
To dig up a tree, simply eat a single fruit of any kind to gain some temporary super strength. You can eat one fruit at a time, and the superpower maxes out at 10 fruit.
Once you’ve dug up a tree, you’ll be able to see what type of tree it is, even if it wasn’t a fruit-bearing day for that tree. This comes in handy when you’re trying to manage and organize all of your fruit trees.
Related: How to make quick bells in ‘Animal Crossing’
Of course, you can always hack away at any given tree by using the ax tool. You cannot cut down trees with a flimsy ax or a stone ax, as those serve as non-damaging means of harvesting wood from your trees.
Just make sure to dig up your tree stumps after you’ve chopped down trees, as they don’t despawn on their own. Feel free to keep a few as a furniture feature for your NPC villagers to sit on. Also, tree stumps can spawn an exclusive type of spider.
Trees and Isabelle’s three star rating
Be wary of how many trees you have, and consider chopping some down/digging some up if Isabelle’s analysis recommends that you do. It’s an important and relatively easy way to get your town’s rating up to three stars, thus triggering the weekly K.K. Slider Saturday night concerts.
Check-in with Isabelle as you clear trees to make sure you haven’t taken away too many. You’ll know you’ve reached the sweet spot when she no longer mentions it in her analysis.
I found that four or five trees in your camera’s view will get you to the tree-to-soil sweet spot. After you’ve unlocked K.K. Slider, you can go back and plant more trees to your heart’s content, without risking K.K. Slider’s departure.
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