Master Your Island: Essential Tools for Animal Crossing New Horizons

Without a good set of Tools in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you're quickly going to find yourself with an empty Museum and very few Bells to your name.

Forget about a table that looks like an orange, tools are the most important items in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. You need an axe to chop down trees, a fishing rod to catch fish, and a shovel to dig up fossils, among many other important jobs. If you want any of these tools, however, then you'll need to find the DIY recipe for each one.

Here's our complete Animal Crossing: New Horizons Tools guide, showing you how to get Tools, how to find the DIY Tool recipes, and listing all Tools.

How to get Tools in New Horizons

To get Tools in New Horizons you need to find its DIY recipe, which will allow you to craft it at any DIY workbench or purchase them at Nook's Cranny. Your first set of Tools will all be of the 'Flimsy' quality - which is the lowest level of Tool you can obtain. They do the job, but they won't last very long at all!

We strongly advise seeking out all the basic Tool DIY recipes because it will save you a lot of Bells as you're going to go through a lot of them the more you do on your island...

In the beginning, you'll only be able to craft flimsy tools. You can get these on your first day by donating insects or fish to Tom Nook, who will give them to you.

To get better tools, you need to get the 'DIY For Beginners' pack from Timmy, which costs 480 Bells. It's worth noting most of these require the flimsy tool as part of its construction - we recommend buying these from Timmy to save on materials.

There are then more tools which are gated by progress. The Shovel and Vaulting Pole require Blathers and the museum to appear on the island, while the Ladder is given to you after Tom Nook asks you to help set up new Villager plots.

You can, however, buy flimsy tools from Residential Services and Nook's Cranny once it opens.

Another tip - if you want to access all of your tools quickly, without having to access your inventory, then you need to purchase the Tool Ring from the Nook Stop, which is located in Residential Services, in exchange for 800 Nook Miles.

How to get DIY tool recipes in New Horizons

If you want to craft a tool in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, then you must first find its DIY recipe.

To do this you must talk to Tom Nook in Residential Services and select the option for, 'What should I do?'

Nook will then tell you which task you should focus on next to further the development of your island. As part of these instructions, he will give you the DIY recipes you need to build certain tools.

Once you have these recipes, you can collect all the materials you need and head to the nearest DIY workbench, either one you've built yourself or the one in Residential Services, to craft your new tool.

Not all tool DIY recipes, however, come from Tom Nook. Blathers, the owl who runs the museum, will give you the recipe you need to craft a Vaulting Pole and, in exchange for 3,000 Nook Miles, you can buy 'Pretty Good Tools Recipes' from the Nook Stop, which will allow you to upgrade your tools.

All Tools in New Horizons

Here's a list of all Tools in New Horizons and what they're used for:

• Axe: Getting wood from trees, chopping trees down, and attacking rocks.
• Fishing Rod: Catching fish from ponds, rivers, and oceans.
• Net: Catching bugs, blossoms, and snowflakes.
• Shovel: Digging up plants, shrubs, trees, and items.
• Slingshot: Shooting down presents from the sky.
• Watering Can: Watering flowers, breeding flowers, watering crops.
• Pole Vault: Vaults over rivers to traverse the island without bridges.
• Ladder: Climbing up and down your island's cliffs.

Good luck on creating your perfect island!