If you find yourself breaking your tools all the time in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you’re probably interested in upgrading to Gold gear as soon as you can. While gold tools can still break, it takes a lot longer, which means less time building replacements and more time soaking up that island life.
Here’s how to find the recipes for all the golden tools.
How to Get Gold Items In Animal Crossing: New Horizons
None of these are something you can realistically grind out in an afternoon. You’ll want to keep these unlock conditions in mind while you go about your daily affairs, chipping away at them one and two at a time when you can. Trying to burn through the unlock conditions as fast as you can will just end up frustrating you.
All the golden tools have roughly the same recipe: one gold nugget, and one typical version of that tool, made without a prefix. For example, to make the golden axe, you need a gold nugget and an axe; a flimsy or stone axe won’t do.
Gold nuggets, in turn, can be found by hitting rocks with your shovel, although they’re much rarer than iron nuggets. You can sell gold nuggets for 10,000 Bells, so it may be tempting to use them as a source of quick cash, but they’re hard to replace. Some of the rarest crafting recipes in the game require gold nuggets, so in the long term–and almost everything about New Horizons is about the long term–you’re better off stockpiling them.
Getting A Golden Axe
Use 100 other axes until they break. It’s probably easiest to mass-produce flimsy axes, since they’re cheap to make and don’t last long.
After your 100th busted axe, you’ll receive the recipe for the golden axe in your mail.
Getting A Golden Bug Net
Complete the Bug section of your Critterpedia by catching all 80 bugs on your island, including the hard-to-find ones like fleas. You’ll get the recipe for the golden bug net in the mail.
You don’t have to donate any of the bugs in order to unlock the recipe for the golden bug net. Just getting them in your Critterpedia is enough.
Getting A Golden Fishing Rod
Complete the Fish section of your Critterpedia by catching all 80 fish on your island. You’ll get the recipe for the golden fishing rod in the mail.
Since the fish you can find in the waters around your island are seasonal, you’ll need to take your time on this one, or indulge in “time traveling” by manually changing the date in your Switch’s System menu.
Getting A Golden Shovel
Roughly every week and a half, give or take a day, Gulliver washes up on the beach of your island. He’ll ask for your help, which requires you to dig up five communicator parts with your shovel. Look for water-spouts on the beaches and dig there to find one.
Notably, if you wait until the next day to give Gulliver a communicator part, it turns into a rusted part instead. That makes them useless to Gulliver, but you need 30 rusted parts to make the giant Robot Hero action figure.
Every time you help Gulliver with his communicator, he’ll mail you new headwear or furniture as a thank-you gift. After you do so 30 times, you receive the recipe for the golden shovel in the mail.
Getting A Golden Slingshot
Shoot down a total of 300 gift balloons with your slingshot. These usually blow in from the ocean every five minutes or so. This also completes the “Raining Treasure” Miles card.
Once you’ve done that, the next gift to blow in off the ocean should have a shiny golden balloon attached to it. Shoot it down and collect the golden slingshot recipe from the gift.
Getting A Golden Watering Can
Raise your island to a 5-star rating and ask Isabelle to evaluate it. She’ll be impressed enough to reward you with the recipe for the gold watering can on the spot.
That scratches off another set of long-term island goals. If you’ve still got a few things left to do, we’ve got a lot of guides for the newest Animal Crossing on our game hub, including:
- Our guide to the May Day Maze
- A master list of all of K.K. Slider’s songs
- How to get some Cosmos Flowers
It’s May, both in the real world and in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, with new bugs and fish to catch on your do-it-yourself island paradise. How’ve you been decorating your house? Got any cool posters to share? Follow us on Twitter @PrimaGames and let us know about your turnip prices.
