Moving rocks and making a rock garden — Animal Crossing: New Horizons guide

Several rocks are across your island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Switch, providing a reliable stream of resources like Iron Nuggets and stone.

It’s likely that the rocks on your island spawned in inconvenient locations, like a spot that interrupts your plans for pathing. Luckily, you can move rocks. In this guide, we’ll show you how.

To move a rock, you need to break it. Eat a fruit to gain strength and smash your shovel into the rock. You’ll need to eat one fruit per rock that you want to break. Broken rocks will respawn in a random location, so it might take a couple of tries to get them where you want to go.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

All of the rocks you break will respawn in a random spot on your island, but note that only one rock will respawn each day. In other words, if you break six rocks today, you’ll only have one rock tomorrow and it will take nearly a week for them all to come back. We’d recommend just breaking one each day, whichever is in the least convenient spot, and repeating that each day until you’re happy with the positioning.

Rocks are extremely important early on to farm Iron Nuggets, as well as collect Bells from a Money Rock, so make sure you don’t smash them all at once. To maximize your resources, limit yourself to breaking one rock per day.