The tools in Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Switch are an essential part your experience. Each of these tools come in various degrees of quality, which means they become more durable the better they are. While the game’s breakable tools can be frustrating, you can eventually craft tools that are longer lasting: golden tools.
How to get golden tools in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
You can get glittery tools, but it’ll take some time
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Golden tools can still break, but they are the highest grade of tools that you can craft. While other crafting tool recipes will unlock over time, golden crafting tools have certain requirements that you must meet before you receive their DIY recipes as rewards. This guide will tell you everything you need to know about golden tools.
How to get golden tools
Each golden tool has a unique requirement, but beware: It’ll take a while to accomplish these tasks. Don’t expect to get them within your first week of playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
While we’ve researched these methods using sources who have crafted these items, we haven’t been able to craft all of them in our games. We’ll update the requirements for each item below as we confirm their methods.
- Golden Axe: Break 100 axes, the easiest being Flimsy Axes.
- Golden Slingshot: Shoot down 300 balloons. After hitting this milestone, look to the skies for a gold-colored balloon. Shoot that down and the DIY recipe will be inside.
- Golden Fishing Rod: Catch every fish in the Critterpedia. The complete list of 80 fish can be found here. It appears that Museum donations are not required for this. The recipe will come in the mail the day after you catch the final fish.
- Golden Watering Can: Reach a 5-star town ranking. Isabelle will give you the DIY recipe after giving you this rating.
- Golden Net: Currently unconfirmed, but in every game prior, the requirement was to catch every bug. This seems highly likely given the Golden Fishing Rod requirement. We’re working toward confirmation.
- Golden Shovel: Currently unconfirmed. Sources are reporting that this requires saving Gulliver on the beach 30 times, but we’ve yet to see an official confirmation or video proof of this. We’re working toward confirmation.
After completing each requirement, you’ll receive the DIY recipe for the golden version of the tool. To craft a golden tool, all you’ll need is the standard version the tool you have the recipe card for and a Gold Nugget, which can randomly pop out when you’re hitting rocks, like you would if you were farming Iron Nuggets.
It will take the average player weeks, if not months, to complete receive each of these recipe cards. Even with the recipes, Gold Nuggets are rare, so keep that in mind. Finally, remember that golden tools can still break. While getting to the point of being able to craft them is its own reward, golden tools are not indestructible endgame devices.
Correction: A previous version of this guide stated the requirements for receiving golden tools more definitively than we’re ultimately comfortable with keeping. We’ve edited the guide to clearly state the golden tool requirements that we’ve confirmed. For those that we haven’t confirmed, we’ve added information based on our best research. We are working toward confirming everything and will update this guide as we do.
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