If you ask me, Animal Crossing is much more fun when you don’t spend all your time in the pursuit of money. But if you’re set on making bank, New Horizons offers you a bunch of good ways to indulge your inner Scrooge. One such option that many new players will gain access to this coming weekend is the Stalk Market, where you can buy and sell turnips and, if you play your rutabagas right, rake in some big Bells.
Animal Crossing aficionados will likely have some experience with turnips, and little seems changed in New Horizons. Every Sunday, your island will be visited by Daisy Mae, a cute young piglet who recently inherited the family business from her grandmother Sow Joan, the salt-of-the-earth turnip merchant from previous games. She sells at a randomised per-veggie price that ranges from around 90 Bells to a little over 100. Turnips are sold in bunches of 10, and you’re only limited by how many you can carry. And while New Horizons doesn’t let you store turnips, it’s safe enough to just plop them down in your house until you need ‘em.
After you stock up, be sure to check in with Timmy and Tommy at Nook’s Cranny as part of your daily checklist. The price at which the tanuki twins purchase your bulbous, vegetable gold varies from incredibly low to incredibly high, mostly falling in-between the extremes.
My biggest score in New Horizons came when Timmy and Tommy were buying turnips for over 300 Bells apiece, while buyers in previous games have been known to go as high as 700 per turnip. Prices previously followed a few specific patterns, but it’s still unclear how exactly such phenomena function in New Horizons. As such, it’s important that you ask them about their turnip prices twice a day—before 12 p.m. local time and then again after the prices change at noon—to keep track of their fluctuations throughout the week.
It’s here that you’ll need to do some gambling. Prices are known to shift gradually except in the case of big spikes. So if you find that Timmy and Tommy are offering more money than you paid for your hoard of turnips, it might be wise to stick it out, at least until the end of the day or the next morning, to see if their asking price continues to rise. But if you see a downward trend that extends into the week, you might be witnessing the vegetable market equivalent of whatever’s happening on Wall Street lately. It’s really up to you how comfortable you feel sitting on turnips for one or two more days in an effort to increase your return.
Don’t wait too long, however. Turnips rot on the following Sunday, rendering them useless—well, unless you want to attract flies. You may just have to cut your losses Saturday evening, and try making another investment the next morning. That said, all it takes is one good week to see your Bells practically explode, ready to spend on home upgrades and island improvements galore. And if you’re diligent, even bad weeks won’t result in a massive loss. Next time Daisy Mae rolls around, introduce yourself and roll the dice; it adds a new layer of strategy to Animal Crossing that could net you more Bells than a medieval cathedral.
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