Animal Crossing New Horizons Tarantula Island

If you're someone who's desperately looking for a way to make some cash, you may want to consider the solution that involves *checks notes* creating an Animal Crossing New Horizons tarantula island?
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Been trying to make some Bells in Animal Crossing: New Horizons? Wondering what the quickest way to do might be? Well, it’s not quite an immediate glitch, but it might be particularly satisfying if you find yourself of the bug-catching persuasion. Yes, we’re talking about making an Animal Crossing New Horizons tarantula island. Here’s how to get it done.

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Animal Crossing New Horizons Tarantula Island

You may have already heard about this particular craze when it comes to making money in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but we don’t blame you if you haven’t quite wanted to believe it. Spiders suck, and honestly, are both pretty dangerous in Animal Crossing as well as in real life. Yes, these creepy crawlies can deliver a fatality to you in the game, though you essentially just wake up slightly worse for wear. Unfortunately, if you’re wanting to make money via a method that takes fewer in-game days than growing a money tree (which we’ve also covered and relinked here for your convenience), there are very few methods that aren’t exploits that work quicker or more efficiently than tarantula farming. 

Players have now found out that a single tarantula retails for 8,000 Bells. Yes. You read that totally correctly. In which case, we can understand why people want to pick up as many of them as possible. Of course, that will require turning an island into your own personal tarantula farming ground. We definitely wouldn’t recommend doing this to your own island, but you know, there’s always another alternative – take your tools and head over to a Mystery Island that you can rip apart for spiders! Here’s what you’re going to have to do on said Mystery Island to summon a flood of spiders:

  • Make sure that you arrive on it at night (after 7pm)
  • Chop out all the trees and dig up the remaining stumps
  • Break the rocks
  • Pluck the flowers (don’t use your shovel)
  • Catch all the bugs or just get rid of them
  • Put your resources on the beach

Once you’ve carried out all of those steps on a Mystery Island that’s one-level only (i.e. doesn’t have traversable cliff faces), then you should be left with an island that just spawns tarantulas. Now, all you have to do is to catch them. They will attack you, but that will just kick you back onto the dock that you arrived at so it’s really not a problem. Catch them the way you’d approach most other flighty bugs – approach slowly and with extreme caution, and fling the net out when you think they’re going to bite. Once you put as many as you can into your inventory, ferry them back to your actual island and sell them for a crazy amount of money!

Now that you’ve got our guide on how to make an Animal Crossing New Horizons tarantula island, you too can start farming these creepy crawlies for a whole lot of cash. If you’re someone with arachnophobia then you might want to give this a miss, but there aren’t that many other ways to make money that don’t indirectly rely on some kind of exploit, like the infinite item glitch that we covered for you here in detail. If you’re sick of your mates having fun because you don’t have a copy of the game yet, why don’t you pick one up here via Amazon and support Prima Games while you’re at it? Need a hand with anything else in Animal Crossing: New Horizons? Have a look at these other tips and tricks that we’ve put together for Island Representatives like yourself in our dedicated guides hub for the game: 


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About the Author

Ginny Woo

Ginny hails from just south of Mordor, and when she's not debating others about the One Ring then she's probably glued to an MMO or a JRPG. With Final Fantasy XIV, Destiny 2, and World of Warcraft on her plate, she's always got something to chat about and a sneaky guide up her sleeve. If writing's not on the cards, then she's probably drinking way too much coffee.