Animal Crossing: New Horizons tree guide

Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Switch has a variety of different tree types, all of which carry over from previous games. Trees are necessary to improve your island’s score, and they provide fruit, Bells, and even random furniture at times. Trees and even tree stumps are also necessary for catching specific bugs. You can even just grow straight-up money trees.

In this Animal Crossing guide, we’ll teach you everything you need to know about trees, from planting to transplanting to finding new fruit and bamboo.

Planting trees

There’s no best way to plant trees, but they do need space. Trees will grow as long as there is one empty block around them in each direction. Flowers and furniture placed outside can be in the adjacent blocks, but not other trees, buildings, cliffs, or water.

If you plant a sapling, you can dig it up and move it. While previous Animal Crossing games would make the sapling disappear completely if you dug it up, New Horizons simply puts the sapling in your pocket.

Moving trees

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

Unlike a sapling, you can’t dig up a fully grown tree with a shovel. However, if you eat a fruit before you attempt to dig up the tree, you’ll gain strength and be able to put the entire tree in your pocket. For each tree you want to move, you’ll have to eat one fruit.

This is great for moving trees without having to completely replant them. You can move all trees (and even bamboo) using this method.

Collecting more fruit and bamboo

Everyone starts Animal Crossing: New Horizons with one native fruit. Accessing other fruit can be difficult.

You can visit other players’ islands online to take some of their fruit or you can try your luck with the Nook Miles Ticket islands. Based on our testing, it was fairly rare to see these islands carry something other than your native fruit. We only saw one other fruit type (oranges, when our native fruit was cherries), but we have seen that same non-native fruit multiple times.

You can also find bamboo this way and use the fruit method to bring back tons for your island.

Correction (March 26): A previous version of this guide stated that cedar trees could not be planted on the bottom half of the island, but they can. We’ve edited the guide to reflect this and removed the incorrect information.

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