The shovel is an essential tool you will need in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Tools come in a variety of forms, including axes and the newly introduced vaulting pole. These items are staples of the series and serve myriad roles in shaping your community. Shovels are necessary for relocating flowers and digging up fossils. This guide will tell you everything you need to know about this useful tool and how to acquire one.

What the Shovel Does in Animal Crossing

Shovels were introduced at the beginning of the franchise. For the most part, their usage has remained identical across the many titles in the series. The tool can be used to both bury items and dig them out. Buried objects are denoted by the now familiar star-shaped crack in the ground. You can use the shovel to excavate fossils and have them examined by the Museum curator Blathers. It can also be used to transplant flowers by digging them up from their current location. With the debut of cooking and energy points in the 2.0 Update, shovels can destroy rocks and relocate whole trees. They can also be used to unearth and grow the reintroduced Gyroids.

The shovel has additional purposes beyond digging. Rocks scattered on your island can be struck to uncover insects, such as pill bugs. Valuable ores like iron and gold nuggets can also be mined from bashing rocks. Each day, there will be a rock that contains Bells, known colloquially as the Money Rock. A maximum amount of 31,900 Bells can be farmed from the Money Rock. If you are feeling mischievous, you can bury pitfall seeds to prank your unsuspecting villagers, perhaps one you despise. Should they step on the buried pitfall crack, they will suddenly plunge into the ground and struggle to escape the trap. But to do all this, you first need to obtain a shovel.

How to Get the Shovel

Your ability to obtain a shovel largely rests on your progress in New Horizons. For those new to the game, you must ensure Blathers is on your island. If he has not appeared yet, you need to donate at least 5 insects/fish to Tom Nook. Once the talkative owl has set up his tent, he will provide you with the recipes for a flimsy shovel and vaulting pole. The flimsy shovel requires 8 hardwood to craft and breaks after 40 uses. Using the Nook Stop terminal, you can acquire the Pretty-Good Tools recipe pack for 3000 Nook Miles. This will give access to the normal shovel, which requires the flimsy version and an iron nugget to craft.

Now that you finally have the tool, you can begin unearthing fossils and moving flora around. There is one thing to remember: New Horizons‘s highly controversial durability mechanic. While only axes could break in previous titles, all tools have durability in this game. After upgrading Nook’s Cranny, new variants of tools will be available for purchase in the cabinet. Some of these include the Colorful, Outdoorsy, and Printed-Design shovels. All of these cost 2500 Bells apiece and can be customized into different colors. One added benefit of re-customizing tools is that it resets their durability counter. But the ace of spades you probably most covet is the illustrious golden shovel.

Gold Digger

The Golden Shovel returns in New Horizons, but not in quite the same form as its previous iterations. In prior games, it was often received through burying a shovel and growing it on a golden tree. New Horizons changes the formula by making it a craftable item, requiring a normal shovel and a gold nugget in its recipe. However, to coincide with the game’s new durability mechanic, it now breaks after roughly 200 uses. Unfortunately, it cannot be customized to reset its durability counter. Unlike previous games, the golden tool is no longer required to plant money trees. This makes New Horizons‘s version of the tool arguably the least beneficial in the series.

Obtaining the golden shovel recipe is more time-consuming than the other golden tools. To craft the item, you must assist the salty seagull, Gulliver. Gulliver will randomly wash up on your beach, usually every week. Waking him from his sand nap sends you on a fetch quest to retrieve his missing communicator parts. You can find them in the small, dark spots spouting water along your beach. They must be dug up in much the same manner as manila clams. You will have to do this on 30 different occasions before Gulliver rewards you with the recipe. Those willing to time travel can ease this by traveling back and forth to the day Gulliver appears.

Dig It

There are many different shovels in New Horizons, though they all perform the same basic actions. While the tool maintains many of the same functions it did in previous games, the introduction of new mechanics like durability and energy points makes it more complex than ever. Shovels are necessary to farm ore, clay, and stones for crafting. The ability to transplant trees and flowers without destroying them makes them useful for changing your island’s layout. You will also need one to shore up your fossil or Gyroid collections. If you decide to go digging, just remember that at any point your trusty trowel can turn to dust.

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