How to move trees in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

While you may enjoy your time plucking fruits from the random trees scattered across Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Switch, there may come a time where you want to move trees and create a pattern or grove of your own design.

While planting fruits into any hole in the ground is the perfect way to get started with customizing where your trees grow, what about trees that are already on your island that have fruit on them? Can you move those fruit trees without damaging them?

Turns out you can move any fruit-bearing tree with harming it. In this guide we’ll explain how you can move any tree in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

There’s two ways of getting fruit trees to exist wherever you want in Animal Crossing: New Horizons: You can take the fruit from any tree and plant it, or you can move existing fruit-bearing trees.

Planting new trees with fruits is pretty easy, but you may want to move the existing fruit-bearing trees you have on your island. To do so, you only need two things: some fruit to eat and any shovel.

Whenever you eat a piece of fruit, you’ll notice a counter with numbers appear on the top left of your screen. Each of those numbers represents a one-time action that you can perform, like breaking rocks with your shovel — or more importantly, digging up whole trees while leaving them intact.

If you use your shovel on a fruit-bearing tree while you have at least one fruit buff, you’ll dig up the whole tree without damaging it. After it’s in your pocket, you can replant the tree wherever you like.

In your pocket, you can even tell which full, fruit-bearing tree is in your inventory by looking at it or hovering your cursor over it. In the image above, you can clearly see the difference between a plain tree and a pear tree.

When you have a tree in your pocket, you can dig a whole in the ground, open your inventory, choose the tree you want to plant, and choose the option to plant it.

We should note that, when trees are still young, you can dig them up without using a fruit buff. Trees are still in their young phase within their first few days. You can check a tree’s age by trying to dig it up without a fruit buff. If it comes out of the ground, it’s still young. If your shovel bounces off it, it’s matured to the point where you’ll need a fruit buff to move it.

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