The stalk market has been one of the fastest ways to make big money in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It’s a tradition that has been passed on from game to game and, in-game, the market has passed down from the hands of the same family. It’s a tradition that took root as far back as the game’s Wild World days.
This feature finds itself once again rooted in the newest rendition of the game. In fact, this feature arguably has flourished to the point where there are even Discord channels to help players strike it rich. If you’re biggest ambition is to become a Bellionaire overnight, we can help with a few choice tips and tricks to play the market.
Further reading
- How to make money in New Horizons
- A guide to eating fruit in New Horizons
- All of the fish to catch in New Horizons
- How to kick villagers out in New Horizons
Getting started: Where and when to buy turnips
All you need to start trading turnips is cash. Bells. Any amount, really. The more you put in, the more you’ll get out if all goes to plan. Profit is profit, so anything you invest will typically be worth the time.
Turnips are sold once a week by Daisy Mae, an adorable little boar who you’ll find wandering around your island with the vegetables strapped to her head. Unlike other traveling merchants like Label, Kicks, and Leif, she’s far more predictable, showing up every Sunday morning without fail. You have until noon that day to buy as many turnips as you want from her, with the price she charges being fluid each week.
Like a real-world investment, the idea is to buy low and sell high. Daisy Mae will usually charge between 90 and 110 Bells per turnip, and she’ll let you buy as many or as few turnips as you like before she closes up shop for the week. You can carry a stack of 100 turnips in each inventory slot, meaning it’s possible to buy no more than 4,000 turnips in a single run at a maximum cost of 440,000 Bells. That’s a lot of cash and a lot of veggies.
Once bought, you have until the following Sunday to sell your turnips to the Nooklings — either on your island or someone else’s. Any turnips left over will spoil and rot, becoming little more than garbage used to attract some bugs like ants for the museum. You can literally watch your money shrivel up, die, and be consumed by insects.
(Side note: This is a great way to pick up hard-to-find bugs, such as ants and flies. Albeit, expensive.)
Storing turnips and the terrors of time travel
Unlike Daisy Mae, you can’t pull millions of turnips out from your pocket like it’s nothing. Those things take up valuable inventory space for most of the week, making the rest of your island life a little less relaxing than it ought to be. Turnips can’t be stored with the likes of your clothes, wood, and leftover Bunny Day crafts, but that doesn’t mean the space afforded by all those house upgrades will go to waste.
Turnips can be placed like furniture. In fact, it’s the only way to get them out of your pocket. Be it inside on your fancy modern wood flooring or outside on the grass, turnips will sit pretty either on the floor or atop a surface like a table or a shelf. One thing to note is that Isabelle and the rest of your island denizens don’t take kindly to turnips left on the ground. They won’t make any passing comments, but a single turnip left lying around will knock your five-star town rating right back down. Clear out the basement if you want to keep things clean.
Once you’re ready to sell, all you have to do is pick them up and lug them over to the Nooklings.
A word of caution, though. Turnips are incredibly sensitive to time paradoxes. That’s something Daisy Mae’s grandmother Joan used to teach us in past games. They won’t survive traveling through time, so if you’re looking to make it big on the stalk market, you have to commit to the natural flow of the universe. That means no changing your system clock to farm Nook Miles or whatever it is that Time Lords get up to these days.
Identifying trends: How to sell turnips for the best price
Selling turnips is more science than art. There’s an element of luck in play, but the advent of internet communications has made it incredibly easy for players to band together to make sense of the seemingly random amounts of green the Nooklings offer for these volatile white vegetables, which change twice a day, before and after noon.
By keeping track of Daisy Mae’s Sunday price (aka the “base price”) and each and every rate the Nooklings offer throughout the week, it’s possible to reasonably predict the price they’ll pay out on any given day. Data is the key to raking in the big Bells, and the internet is awash with tools to help you do it.
Online apps like Turnip Prophet offer a convenient way to track your turnip trends, so you know exactly when to round up your veggies and cash in, practically eliminating the risk of making a loss on your week’s investment.
Based on past data, it’s possible to predict the trend your week’s turnip prices will follow. The four known patterns turnip prices adhere to are as follows:
- Small Spike
- Large Spike
- Decreasing
- Random
These are the currently understood patterns, and they’re about as self-explanatory as they come. Small spikes see prices jump to around the 200 Bell mark at some point in the week, whereas a large spike can peak anywhere up to 660 Bells. Decreasing will see the Nooklings offer less and less than the base price as the week goes on, while random is just that — random. You’ll never make more than 140% profit on a random trend, so it’s best to sell whenever the Nooklings offer you higher than your purchase price.
Whichever trend you have in one week plays a part in the following week’s trend, too. If you make it big with a large spike, there’s very little chance it’ll happen a second time in a row. If you struggle to make your cash back on a decreasing trend, there’s a good chance you’ll have a more lucrative trend next time around.
Making the most of it all: Finding friends in high places
Because of how trends can be tracked and virtually follow you into the next week, maximizing your profits means relying on a network of friends, family, or the kindness of strangers online. If you know a few others playing the game, you can help each other make it big by communicating turnip prices and trends and selling your wares on whoever’s island is likely to pay out the most.
When trading online with strangers, things get a little more complicated. Networks like the countless Animal Crossing Discord channels out there are incredibly busy right now. People are at each other’s throats when it comes to trading turnips. You’ll have a far easier time tracking down someone’s large spike here, but a very tough time climbing over the crowd to get in and out before the host shuts their gates. Even if you’re able to get onto an island to sell, you might find yourself paying a hefty commission fee for the privilege, since players aren’t in it just for the fun of the game anymore.
In a best-case scenario, you can buy a bag full of turnips for 360,000 Bells on Sunday and sell them at 660 Bells a few days later for 2,460,000, earning yourself a taste profit of around 2 million for doing next to nothing. You can buy a full inventory every week and then upsell it like that for as long as you’re able to stock the goods.
If you don’t have the cash to make that kind of dough in one week, you can still play the stalk market to reach these lofty heights. The more you invest, the more you’ll be able to earn, so it can be worth the risk of playing for the potential payoff.
