Animal Crossing: New Horizons has an interesting economy, to say the least. If you’ve been playing the game for at least a few days, you’ve likely sold fruit, bugs, fish, and various random items to make a quick bell. But as your house payments get bigger and you move to make infrastructure improvements, you’ll need more and more money. Luckily, you can make hundreds of thousands of bells in high-risk, high-reward speculation in Animal Crossing’s equivalent of the stock market: the stalk market.
Named for the turnips you’re buying and selling, the stalk market is a finicky thing. But you can stand to make major profits if you keep an eye on Timmy and Tommy’s prices and know when to sell. We’ve rounded up everything you need to know about Animal Crossing’s turnip trade, from how to buy turnips to the types of stalk market patterns you should look out for and our best tips.
For more financial tips, check out our guide to making money in New Horizons. You can also see our roundup of all our Animal Crossing guides for more tips, important info, and more.
How To Buy And Store Turnips
Turnips in Animal Crossing operate on a weekly cycle. Each Sunday after you’ve unlocked Nook’s Cranny, an adorable boar named Daisy Mae will visit your town and sell turnips from 5 AM to 12 PM. She sells them in bundles of 10 for a varying price each week–somewhere between 90 and 110 bells per turnip. There’s no limit to how many you can buy before she leaves so long as you have the bells, and we recommend buying regardless of her price, though buying low is obviously preferable.
All the turnips you buy will rot the following Sunday and become worthless, so in order to make any money, you’ll need to sell the week’s turnips sometime before Saturday evening. In the meantime, you don’t have to keep turnips in your pockets; while you can’t store them in your home storage, you can drop them on the floor in your home or outside. Keep in mind that any visitors can pick up the turnips you leave outside, so if you don’t have space in your house, make sure you fence in the turnips so they don’t get stolen!
Warning: Time Travel
Be careful when changing the time in your game when playing the stalk market; turnips may rot if you time travel. In our testing, they only spoiled if we traveled forward beyond the week we bought them in, which is less punishing than in previous Animal Crossing games. Still, proceed with caution!
Selling Turnips: When Should You Sell?
Starting each Monday, Timmy and Tommy will start buying turnips from you; the only day they don’t buy turnips is Sunday. Generally, around 170 bells per turnip is a decent price, but in a good week you can see prices in the 300s and 400s and in rare cases even up to the 600s. Conversely, in a bad week you might have to sell your turnips for only slightly more than you paid for them.
Timmy and Tommy change their prices twice daily, once when Nook’s Cranny opens in the morning and again at noon. This is where things get a little complicated: There are a few general patterns their prices will follow throughout the week, so it’s important to ask them for their prices twice every day to get a sense of what pattern you have.
The main patterns to look for are outlined below. Note that much of this information is based on Animal Crossing: New Leaf’s stalk market, so we’ll update this guide if we discover any differences.
Spike Patterns
“Spike” (or “hill” and “mountain”) patterns, as fans refer to them, are ideal. The general rule with these patterns is that there is a spike in price sometime during the week which is both preceded and followed by a period of decreasing prices. For example, your week might look something like this (based on my prices last week, though the numbers aren’t exact):
- Monday AM: 92 bells
- Monday PM: 88 bells
- Tuesday AM: 83 bells
- Tuesday PM: 76 bells
- Wednesday AM: 134 bells
- Wednesday PM: 387 bells
In this example, the prices at the beginning of the week drop by a few bells each time, which is the first requirement for a spike. The second requirement is an increase in price later in the week, which happens Wednesday morning. If it’s indeed a spike pattern, there should be an even higher price the next time the price changes–in this case, Wednesday afternoon. This is the time to sell.
There is also a similar pattern with much more modest price increases, but generally, you don’t want to sell on the first increase. The number of increases until the peak price seems to vary (we’ve seen only two, like in the above example, while three is also common), so we’ll update as the weeks go on and we test the stalk market further. Some players have apparently encountered spike patterns that had a price decrease in between two increases, so we’ll keep an eye out for this as well.
Decreasing Pattern
While the spike patterns always begin with decreasing prices, if you don’t see any increases by Thursday, you probably (and unfortunately) have the decreasing pattern. In this pattern, prices just keep decreasing, and you won’t be able to sell at a profit–unless you travel to someone else’s island, which we’ll get into below.
Random Pattern
Like the name implies, this pattern results in random prices throughout the week. If your prices do anything besides decrease the first few times you check, you have the random pattern. The good news is that you can still make a small profit from this pattern–just sell as soon as the price is higher than what you paid for the turnips.
How To Recover From Bad Prices
If you got a bad pattern or didn’t sell at the right time, you’re not completely screwed: You can sell your turnips on other people’s islands! If you have friends who are also playing the stalk market, it’s a good idea to talk to them about your prices throughout the week and see if you might get a better deal elsewhere.
What To Do With Rotten Turnips
If you forgot about your turnips, it’s not a total loss! There’s one good use for rotten turnips: attracting ants and flies. These two bugs only appear around garbage, including rotten turnips, so they can be hard to catch. They appear year-round and at any time of day, though, so all you have to do is drop your rotten turnips (or other garbage) and walk around until they appear. They don’t sell for a lot, but you’ll need them to complete your Critterpedia and museum. Once you’ve caught the bugs, you can toss the rotten turnips in any garbage bin furniture item.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons News And Guides
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- Animal Crossing: New Horizons Bug Guide
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons – New Fish And Bugs In April
- How To Crossbreed Flowers In Animal Crossing: New Horizons
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