Animal Crossing: New Horizons resource and crafting material guide

There are several different resources available in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but the most common and widely used is wood. There are three types: wood, hardwood, and softwood, all of which are used as core crafting materials. You can get all three types of wood by hitting trees with an axe, although you’re never guaranteed a specific type of wood. This guide covers the exact tools, the safest method to gather without felling trees, and the fastest strategies to stock up.

How to get tree branches, wood, softwood and hardwood

There are three types of wood resources in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and they can all be found by hitting trees with an axe. For each time you hit a tree with an axe, you’ll receive one piece of any of the three wood types, up to a maximum of three wood per tree.

Tree branches can also be found in Animal Crossing: New Horizons and are required for crafting most major tools. Thankfully, branches are aplenty and can be found at the foot of any tree or fall from trees once hit with an axe or shaken by you.

Can trees grow back once chopped down?

No. Once trees have been chopped down to their stumps, they will not grow back. If you’d like to grow a new tree in its location, use your shovel to remove the stump and plant a new tree with saplings or seeds.

How to get clay, nuggets, and stone

Rocks can be found across your island, and they provide you with some of the game’s most important resource materials for creating tools and other items: stone and iron nuggets. However, rocks also generate clay and the rarer gold nuggets.

Whenever you hit rocks with a shovel, you bounce back. You’ll need to step towards the rock every time you want to hit, but since resources can only be smacked from a stone for a short timed window, doing this wastes valuable time and reduces the amount of resources, as well as Bells when hitting a money rock, you earn.

The easiest way to grab these handy resources is by digging two holes behind you in a V shape to prevent you from bouncing back. This means all you need to do is keep hitting the rock until all resources or money, always a maximum of eight, have been hit out of the rock.

Why did I smash a rock?

You smashed a rock because you likely ate a piece of fruit beforehand. Doing so strengthens you, allowing you to smash rocks and dig up and place fully grown adult trees. If you’ve smashed a rock, don’t worry, they respawn the next day in a new location.

How to get bamboo, bamboo shoots, and weeds

When you first start Animal Crossing: New Horizons, there won’t be any bamboo or bamboo shoots on your island, but there will be a lot of weeds. Weeds appear as thick pieces of grass or short, pink flowers that spread across your island unattended. They’re needed for some DIY recipes, so it’s worth keeping some on your island and collecting as needed.

Bamboo, meanwhile, can only be collected by visiting mystery islands. You’ll find adult bamboo growing on remote islands, and you’ll need to chop at the trees with an axe to collect bamboo.

Bamboo shoots, which are also used for DIY recipes, can be bought from Daisy Mae after purchasing 100 turnips for the first time, and they can be dug from the ground near adult bamboo trees. You’ll find the usual crack in the ground beside bamboo trees where shoots can be dug up.

How to get star fragments

There are 13 different types of star fragments in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, all of which can be used for DIY recipes. Obtaining a star fragment is simple; you just need to make a wish whenever you see a meteor or shooting star zoom across the night sky.

Celeste, Blathers’ sister, will visit your island whenever there is a meteor shower, but shooting stars can appear on any clear night without Celeste appearing on your island. When a shooting star or meteor does appear in the sky, you’ll want to hit the A button on your Nintendo Switch Joy-Con or controller when you’re not holding anything to successfully make a wish.

Depending on the meteor shower, whether it’s an ordinary meteor shower or any of the other 12 representing the zodiac, you’ll be able to grab up to a maximum of 20 star fragments the next day on one of your beaches.

• Aquarius: January 20 – February 18
• Pisces: February 19 – March 20
• Aries: March 21 – April 19
• Taurus: April 20 – May 20
• Gemini: May 21 – June 21
• Cancer: June 22 – July 22
• Leo: July 23 – August 22
• Virgo: August 23 – September 22
• Libra: September 23 – October 23
• Scorpius: October 24 – November 22
• Sagittarius: November 23 – December 22
• Capricorn: December 23 – January 19

An alternative way of collecting star fragments is by visiting a mystery island via Kapp’n’s boat tour (Unlocked once your island receives a three star rating and you’ve attended K.K. Slider’s concert) and being lucky enough to land on the star fragment island, which is in the middle of a meteor shower (So make wishes!) and where you can collect star fragments by hitting rocks and prowling the island’s beaches.

Seasonal crafting material: Spring bamboo, snowflakes, cherry blossom and more

Since Animal Crossing: New Horizons plays in real-time, there are a lot of seasonal crafting materials available, including snowflakes during the winter, cherry blossom and spring bamboo during springtime, and a variety of mushrooms during autumn or fall.

Here’s a quick roundup of what you can find during each season:

Spring

• Spring bamboo: Chop down bamboo trees
• Cherry blossom: Catch with a net during cherry blossom season

Summer

• Summer shell: Found on a beach

Autumn

• Acorn: Falls from trees once shaken or hit with an axe
• Pinecone: Falls from trees once shaken or hit with an axe
• Maple leaf: Catch with a net
• Rare mushroom: Found at the foot of trees during mushroom season
• Elegant mushroom: Found at the foot of trees during mushroom season
• Flat mushroom: Found at the foot of trees during mushroom season
• Round mushroom: Found at the foot of trees during mushroom season
• Skinny mushroom: Found at the foot of trees during mushroom season

Winter

• Snowflake: Catch with a net
• Large snowflake: Given out by Snowboy (One of four snowpeople you can make)