Animal Crossing: New Horizons offers you the chance to terraform your island getaway into just about anything you can imagine, but you’ve got to walk before you can run. Here’s what to do about those pesky rocks that litter your yard.

How to Move Rocks in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Rocks are an asset in New Horizons, as you can pummel them with your shovel or axe to make useful items fall out, such as iron nuggets. If a rock isn’t in your way at the moment, there’s no reason to get rid of it when you could be farming it for useful crafting materials instead.

If your ambitions involve the patch of ground that rock is occupying, however, it’s time to get your hands dirty. Unfortunately, rocks aren’t quite as manipulable as trees are in New Horizons; you can’t simply dig them up and drop them somewhere else. Your only option for dealing with an inconvenient rock is pure destruction.

Most players will just sell their Fruit, but you can also eat it. This provides you with a long-lasting buff that stacks up in the upper-left corner of the screen and doesn’t immediately seem to do anything. However, each stack of Fruit power, up to 10, represents one extra-power swing you can make with your tools. With Fruit in your system, you can dig up trees, which will be placed in your inventory for later replanting, or shatter rocks completely with one hit from your axe or shovel. If you end up with extra stacks of the Fruit buff and nothing useful to do with them, you can get rid of them by making a quick restroom visit.

A broken rock is removed from the game entirely for a few days, so it’s a good idea to wait on rock removal until you don’t have a pressing need for any of the raw materials you can harvest from them. It will eventually respawn on a random unoccupied tile somewhere on your island. Theoretically, you could force rocks to reappear in a set location by guaranteeing there are only so many unoccupied tiles left for them to appear on, but that’s a really long-term project. Then again, so is everything else in New Horizons… at least, in theory.

We’ve been living our island lives for a while now, and our game hub is full of what we’ve learned. Examples:

• How to catch the elusive and noisy mole cricket
• Got a villager you’d rather be rid of? Here’s how to encourage them to leave
• “Bass Guy” is the New Horizons summertime jam you’re looking for

Animal Crossing: New Horizons gives you a lot of options for rearranging your island to your satisfaction, but it is a little weird that you can’t just dig up and move your big rocks. I suppose that would make it almost dangerously convenient to farm them for nuggets, though. Share your thoughts on this important topic with us via our official Twitter, @PrimaGames.