If you’re waiting for a crop of, say, fruit trees to grow, you can alter your Switch’s system clock forward to speed up the harvest. It’s possible to juice your money making in Animal Crossing by employing a practice known as “time travel.” Because the game’s narrative is tied to your console’s system clock and plays out in real time, it’s open to abuse, of a sort. Transactions are often handled by the platform, with arrangements then made on private Discord channels. Several pages include listings for when sellers will be online and promises of how fast they’ll be able to deliver the bells. One listing, for instance, offers 12 million bells for $12, with the seller arriving on your in-game island within a few hours of purchase. Search around Etsy and eBay and you’ll soon find offers for millions of Animal Crossing bells for between $5 and $20. It’s here that entrepreneurial Animal Crossing players are making a little bit of real money while sheltering in place, and not by trading Turnip futures. But if you’re time-poor and cash-rich, it’s possible to buy quantities of bells through online platforms that are then “gifted” to you inside the game. Of course, this process of starting a community and earning your first “paycheck” requires a lot of tedious busywork, better known as grinding. You can even get better-than-market-rate fees by selling “hot” items that are in-demand that day. Earning this cash means taking the fish you catch, the fruit you grow and your creations to Nook’s Cranny, the local store, and exchanging them. For instance, if you want to purchase clothing or accessories, the price runs from 800 bells all the way up to over 100,000 bells for something extravagant.

The game’s primary currency is bells, designed to mirror the rough valuation of the Japanese yen. When you begin the game, you are in debt to local landlord Tom Nook and have to work towards the goal of financial independence.

The more well developed your community, the more characters come to live there, further increasing your wealth. You fish, grow fruit, craft tools and furniture while working to improve your island home. If you’re unfamiliar, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a sim game for the Nintendo Switch in which you build a life for yourself in a community of adorable, anthropomorphic animals.

How to make real money in minecraft