Items

Nothing in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is hard to obtain. What varies is how much of it the game lets you have before it closes the tap. Wood and stone are yours for as long as you keep swinging, fossils stop at five a day, turnips exist for one morning a week, boba tea for four Sunday nights in August, and birthday gifts come round once a year. Those allowances, not rarity, decide how you should plan around the fourteen items covered on our pages, so that is how this guide sorts them.

Each tier below explains what caps the supply, what the cap is, and the one workaround our pages found for it. Several of those workarounds lead back to the same lever, the clock trick on our mechanics guide, which is why the ration matters more than the item: a daily cap resets with a date change, a once-a-year cap needs a different year entirely.

Every item and its allowance

Unlimited: take as much as you can carry

Four pages describe things with no allowance at all. Resource materials is the primer: wood, hardwood and softwood come off any tree you hit with an axe (keep hitting and it falls), branches from shaking, clay, stone, iron and gold nuggets from rocks, weeds from pulling, and the boot, empty can and tire from fishing. Its one worked example is a library needing five wood and three book furniture items, which shows why recipes on our recipes guide sometimes ask for furniture rather than raw stock. The only real limit is the daily rock cycle, which belongs to the mechanics pages.

Money bags are made from your own funds: hover over the Bells in your inventory, choose an amount, and anything of 1,000 or more becomes a bag while smaller sums stay coins. You can hold 99 bags at a time. The page's three uses are planting one in the glowing hole for a money tree that returns three bags, gifting one to a villager for a reaction and sometimes a return present, and handing one over as payment when trading on another player's island.

The Nook Phone is given once and never rationed. Its page walks the apps, Camera, Passport, Nook Miles, Custom Designs, DIY Recipes, Map, Rescue Service and Party Play, then lists what the Nook Stop sells for miles: the Nook Miles Ticket at 2,000, Pretty Good Tools Recipes at 3,000, the Pocket Organization Guide at 5,000, the Tool Ring and Custom Design Pro Editor at 800 each, and Nook Inc. clothing from 400 to 800. None of it sells out. The Plaza merry-go-round is the same story for a single piece of furniture: 6,000 miles at the Nook Stop, a 3 x 3 footprint, four colour variations that only Reese and Cyrus can swap for 5,200 Bells, a 30,000-Bell resale price, and a place in Frobert's vacation home if you own the expansion. No villager owns one, so the Nook Stop is the only source short of a friend.

Daily: the island resets these overnight

Five pages share a midnight reset, and they are where a date change pays off most. Fossils spawn as five star-shaped cracks a day, with two or three extra for a day or two if you have been away. Every dig is a random pull from 73 pieces, so the page's advice is to have Blathers assess everything, donate the new ones, trade duplicates with friends, and sell the rest. Its price list runs from 1,000 Bells for a Dinosaur Track or Shark-Tooth Pattern to 6,000 for a Brachiosaurus Skull or the T. Rex skull, which is why fossils also anchor the Bells farming page. The whole set fills three rooms of the museum.

Star fragments have a stricter cap and a rarer trigger. A meteor shower needs Celeste on the island after 7 PM and, for certainty, villagers and Isabelle mentioning it; the shower itself runs until 4 AM. Face the sky with empty hands and press A at each streak. Your own wishes yield up to 20 fragments on the beach next morning, and visitors add one fragment per five wishes to a second cap of 20, so 40 is the daily ceiling. The colour split is 80 percent regular, 5 percent large, 15 percent zodiac (matching the sign in the sun, Leo in August and so on). Every wand recipe on the page costs three regular fragments plus a signature item, from a Large Star Fragment for the Magic Wand to a Red Rose for the Rose Wand, and each zodiac furniture piece wants two of its own fragments and gold nuggets. Kapp'n's island rocks are the page's off-season source.

Pearls are capped by a character rather than a counter. Pascal surfaces once a day when you catch your first scallop, and the page says to accept the trade every time because refusing ends his visit for the day; he usually hands over a pearl, sometimes a mermaid recipe or clothing. The uncapped route is diving for them directly, spotting the thin, nearly straight column of bubbles that marks a pearl instead of a creature. A wet suit is 3,000 Bells at Nook's Cranny or 800 Nook Miles, each pearl sells for 10,000 Bells, and the 14-piece mermaid furniture set needs one or two pearls per recipe.

Gyroids and glowing moss and vines are both rationed by Kapp'n's single 1,000-mile boat tour per day. On gyroids, every tour island hides at least one fragment in a star crack, rainy or snowy islands add a fully grown gyroid, and back home you bury the fragment, water it (or let weather do it) and dig up a gyroid the next day. Your own island adds two grown gyroids the morning after rain or snow, but only if you were playing while it fell, and since Update 2.0 fragments wash up on the beach about 30 percent of the time. There are 36, Cyrus recolours any of them for 1,000 Bells, and the Brewstoid from Brewster is the one he cannot touch. Moss and vines grow only on rare Kapp'n islands or, guaranteed, on the cliff behind the Paradise Planning office if you own Happy Home Paradise. Neither can be planted at home, moss sells for 25 Bells and vines for 50, and the recipes (a Cave is 10 vines, 20 moss and 30 stone) come only from bottles on those same islands.

Weekly: one window, then wait

Turnips are the game's tightest schedule. Daisy Mae sells them on Sunday morning only, in bunches of ten, at a price between 50 and 150 Bells that changes weekly; under 100 is the page's buy signal. Nook's Cranny buys them every day except Sunday at a price that moves at noon and midnight, so you get twelve quotes before the following Sunday, and a friend's island with a better quote is a legitimate exit. Miss the week and they rot, which is also the one thing time travel cannot fix, as the mechanics guide explains.

Heart crystals are weekly inside a month. During wedding season you photograph Reese and Cyrus's ceremonies on Harv's island, and the page rates Reese as easy to please. Each accepted shoot pays up to 11 crystals a day, 77 a week, for the whole event. Cyrus's shop then sells 26 wedding pieces for 3 to 40 crystals each, the Pipe Organ at 40 and the Arch, Cake Dress and Tuxedo at 20 being the expensive end, with a limit of eight orders at a time and delivery by mail a day later. A week of photos also unlocks the Wedding Fence recipe (five iron nuggets and three softwood per ten fences), and the Wedding Wand needs the four-crystal Flower Stand plus three star fragments from the tier above.

Seasonal: a few nights a year

Boba tea exists only during the Fireworks Festival, every Sunday in August from 7 PM to midnight, when Redd runs a raffle outside Resident Services. Tickets are 500 Bells and the draw is random, so the page's method is to keep buying. The five flavours, green, mango, milk, coffee and strawberry, can each be sipped three times for the same energy a fruit gives, and they share the prize pool with sparklers, balloons, a pinwheel, three frozen treats and four cotton candies, all listed on the page.

The bunny wand is seasonal and also a one-time reward. During Bunny Day you craft the 16 furniture and decor pieces on the page (table, bed, wall clock, glowy garland, flooring, crown, fence, rug, wreath, vanity, wardrobe, bag, lamp, both balloon sets and the stool) from eggs; clothing recipes do not count. Around April 12 Zipper hands over the Wobbling Zipper Toy recipe, and showing him the finished toy earns the wand recipe: that toy plus three star fragments. The wand stores outfits for instant changes. The egg types and the full recipe list live on our events guide.

Yearly: the birthday party

Birthday items are the slowest collection in the folder. On your birthday a villager walks you to a party with three friends, you blow out the candles for one gift, then hit the pinata fast enough to get 10 cupcakes rather than six. Each unwrapped cupcake given to a villager at friendship level 3 or higher comes back as one of eight items: the cake, candles, sign and table, the hat and shades, and the party wall and flooring. Mom sends a cake and you bank 2,000 Nook Miles, and K.K. Slider plays that evening whatever the weekday. Resale runs from 100 to 300 Bells for the furniture to 620 for the shades. The page's shortcut is the only one that needs a different year: travel to your birthday, collect, save, then travel to the same date the following year, because repeating the same year does nothing.

Frequently asked questions

How many fossils can I dig up in a day?

Five, from the star-shaped cracks that appear each morning, with a couple more on the first days back after a break. There are 73 to donate before the museum's fossil wing is complete.

What is the daily limit on star fragments?

Twenty from your own wishes and up to twenty more earned from visitors' wishes, five wishes per fragment, so forty at most wash up the next day.

When can I buy turnips?

Only on Sunday morning from Daisy Mae. Sell at Nook's Cranny any other day, checking the price at noon and midnight, and never hold them past the next Sunday.

Which items depend on other systems?

Pearls need a wet suit, gyroids and moss need Kapp'n's boat, and every wand needs star fragments. The tools that gather all of this are compared on our tools guide, and the rest of the island is mapped from the Animal Crossing: New Horizons hub.