20 Things I Wish I Knew Sooner In Animal Crossing New Horizons - ACNH Beginner Guide 2023

Are things that a lot of players wish they had known sooner in Animal Crossing New Horizons? In this ACNH beginner guide 2023, we talk about full of useful tips and tricks to help out new players and just those who wanted to learn something new about the game. Whether you're new to the game, you've just started playing or you've been playing for a few months or even if you've been playing for years, then hopefully there'll be some things here that can help you out on your New Horizons Journey. So without waiting any longer, let's jump right into this!

ACNH Beginner Guide - 20 Tips & Tricks To Start Animal Crossing New Horizons

Tip 1 - Transparent Patterns

First of all, you can use transparent patterns to prevent things from growing on the ground. This could be weeds, fossils appearing, flowers, you name it. This is such a useful thing and the transparent patterns won't look ugly on the ground because they're transparent you can't see them.

Tip 2 - Skip Kapp’n

If you happen to be taking a boat ride with a famous Kapp’n, then you can actually spam the beat button so he'll stop singing. Sometimes you just want to head to an island right away and his singing really interrupts you, so spam that beat button and you can get there a lot quicker.

Tip 3 - Kapp’n Island

Speaking of Kapp’n Islands, you should definitely know that you won't be able to see certain types of Kapp’nIslands until you've experienced the equivalent yourself in the game. For example, you can visit a Kapp’n Island that will be based around fall, if you haven't yet seen fall in your current gameplay, you haven't gotten to fall yet then you definitely need to do that before you can get that version of a Kapp’n. It's basically set up this way, so someone who has only just started playing and is in the spring season can't suddenly start getting rarer items from later on in the year. They have to wait!

Tip 4 - Faster Crafting

You can spam the button to speed up crafting. Crafting can be quite a slow process sometimes and although we don't have bulk crafting in the game it is such a shame. It can be really useful to do this to speed things up just so you don't spend too much time crafting menus.

Tip 5 - Coconut Trees

If you like the coconut trees, then this is a tip for you. You can use the terraforming tool to put sand down on the ground so that you can grow coconut trees anywhere. As long as the sand is underneath them, they will grow. They can't grow on regular grass but you can put down the sand path on top of grass and then you can grow coconut trees. This is a must-know trick for anyone who has a tropical-themed island but it can just be really useful to have coconut trees in other places and makes the scenery of your Island a lot more varied.

Tip 6 - Wasp Trick

Wasp will never nest in palm trees, so if you want to get some wood, this can be a good place to start. You won't have to worry about running for your life from those terrifying wasps because they just won't come out of coconut trees. A lot of people didn't even realize you could get wood from coconut trees, so this is another tip that you might find useful.

Tip 7 - Faster Dialogue

This one might seem obvious to a lot of people but it's one of the most common things that people wish they'd known sooner. You can actually press L to speed up a dialogue rather than press B. Now if you do want to press B that's fine. But sometimes you might find yourself saying no to things or skipping certain dialogue that you didn't want to. Whereas L won't act like the B button getting rid of menus. It will simply just act as a way of speeding up a dialogue which is really useful because some of these characters do talk a little bit too much.

Tip 8 - Item Secret

Did you know that you can play with small types of items on top of the Castle Towers? Now these have to be the types of items that only take up one single square. If they're any bigger than that, you will not be able to put them on top, but you could do all kinds of cool things like having a little gyroid act as a watch for the castle tower. We definitely recommend doing this if you do use any of the castle items on your Island.

Tip 9 - House Feature

Depending on what type of wallpaper you have inside your house, you can actually close and open the curtains. This also applies to the blinds too. If you want a little bit more privacy because the sun is filling up your room during the day and you want some more ambient lighting, then it could be a good idea to close the curtains. Otherwise, this is more just kind of a fun little detail that not a lot of people seem to know about. When you're starting up Animal Crossing New Horizons and you're planning out your Island, it can be a really good idea to put all of the buildings that you place down onto the beach. This means they won't get in the way of progress on the main island and you won't have to spend a ton of ACNH bells later on to move them all around. We highly recommend doing this especially if you're going to flatten your Island and you don't want those buildings getting in the way.

Tip 10 - Beach Buildings

More and more people have been restarting or just starting the game in general lately, so this could be really useful to know. Sadly you can't do it with things like the resident services building or the airport.

Tip 11 - Fast Bells

If you are starting off, then you might need a good way to get a lot of bells without too much effort and a really simple way of doing so is going after sea creatures. Get yourself a wetsuit, head into the ocean, and just catch tons of sea creatures. If you can fill up your pockets all the way, then you should get a ton of bells. It's a really lucrative way of doing so and it takes a lot less time than some of the other methods do like catching bugs or going off to fish. So this could be a really good way for starters to make a lot of bells at once. When you get the hang of it though, turnips are probably the best way overall.

Tip 12 - Turnip Trick

You can actually eat 10 turnips at once to get a bunch of energy without having to eat food one after the other. This is a really useful way of getting a lot of energy if you want to dig up trees or smash some rocks. We do recommend in general just cooking instead you don't want to waste your turnips by eating them. So instead cook some food and that should give you energy pretty fast as well.

Tip 13 - Energy Secret

If you have eaten too much food, did you know that you can actually sit on the toilet to get rid of the excess food that you have? This can be helpful if you don't want to smash any rocks by accident but you still want the materials or bells from them. So it's true you literally can poop in Animal Crossing New Horizons.

Tip 14 - Pipe Secret

You can use Mario pipes to go inside buildings, these won't just teleport you around the island, you could put one of them inside of a house and then it'll take you inside a building which can be a really great way to get there super fast. This only works with your own house, sadly it doesn't work with things like the shop. You can't place items down in them so generally you can't place ACNH items yourself, it won't really work.

Tip 15 - Katrina’s Fortune

Heading over to Harvey's Island, Katrina's luck will only activate if you actually talk to her. If you didn't know, you have luck every single day and Katrina needs to be the one to activate this. You could get good luck where you'll find yourself getting a ton of bells or just good luck with your residence, but you could also get bad luck and start tripping up. If you do or do not want to activate luck that day, you'll have to decide whether you want to talk to Katrina or not. You should start off every single day by talking to Katrina because good luck heavily outweighs bad luck.

Tip 16 - Get More Art

You might have seen that Redd sets up his own store on Harvey's Island as well. If you're sick of seeing the same paintings from him every day, that's because really you need to start buying them. When you buy a painting from him whether it's real or fake, he will replace it with another the next day. So if you want to change out his inventory then we recommend you do that. You may end up having to buy some fake paintings sometimes, but if you're really searching for that real art and you want to complete your museum quickly.

Tip 17 - Sahara’s Store

Sahara is interesting because they're actually more expensive at Harvey's Island and they won't give you tickets. So it might be worth just spending more of your bells on Sahara when they come to visit your actual island. But Sahara might actually have different stock here so that could be really useful too.

Tip 18 - Free Rare Items

If you head into resident services, then you can actually find certain exclusive items in the recycling bin. For example, this is where you can find the sloppy set of furniture which is a really cool exclusive type of furniture for all of your favorite lazy villages or just your own house too.

Tip 19 - Ordinances

Whilst you're in resident services, have you set up an ordinance? Because there's one that you might actually not want to use. This is the beautiful town ordinance and honestly, it could potentially ruin your town with flowers. The beautiful ordinance will make flowers grow and spread a lot quicker than they would have without it. So if this is already a problem on your Island then it could potentially make things much worse. So we would definitely be careful about having this ordinance if that is an issue that you've been struggling with.

Tip 20 - Villager Homes

Whilst you're here if you have Happy in Paradise, you can talk to Isabel and she'll actually reset your villager's home to how it was at the very start. So if you've already made changes to yourself that you didn't like and you want to revert or perhaps your villager had a more basic home and you wanted their normal default home. Then you can simply reset it and it'll look brand new.