How to quickly get iron nuggets in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2024)

• You can get iron nuggets in Animal Crossing: New Horizons by hitting rocks with a shovel or axe.
• Every rock on your Animal Crossing island can give up to eight iron nuggets each day, but you have to be fast.
• To make sure you always get the most iron nuggets possible, dig holes near the rock you're mining.

If you're trying to craft an item in Animal Crossing: New Horizons that's made of metal, chances are you'll need iron nuggets. Iron nuggets are some of the most commonly used materials in the game — but unfortunately, they're also some of the hardest to consistently find.

This can be especially frustrating in the early game, when Tom Nook tasks you with finding 30 iron nuggets to build Nook's Cranny. If you're unlucky, completing this quest can take days. But if you know where to look (and how to mine) you can get all the iron nuggets you need in just a few minutes.

Here's how to get iron nuggets in Animal Crossing, including a guide on the absolute best way to mine them.

How to get iron nuggets in Animal Crossing

You can find single iron nuggets by shooting balloons out of the sky. And if you're working on Tom Nook's request for 30 iron nuggets, your fellow villagers might occasionally give them to you when you chat.

But the absolute best way to find iron nuggets in Animal Crossing is by mining for them.

Every town in Animal Crossing: New Horizons has six large rocks scattered across the island. Every day, you can strike these rocks with a shovel or axe to make iron nuggets, stones, clay, or (rarely) gold nuggets pop out. Each rock can produce up to eight materials each day.

As soon as you strike a rock, a countdown will begin. You have ten seconds to strike the rock as many times as possible. Once the ten seconds are up, it'll stop producing materials and you'll have to wait until tomorrow.

Whenever you strike a rock, there's a 34 percent chance that it'll give you an iron nugget (compared to 50 percent for stone and 15 percent for clay). So not only do you have to be fast, but you have to be lucky too.

Fortunately there's a special way to strike rocks in Animal Crossing that will guarantee you always produce eight items. It won't guarantee that they'll all be iron nuggets, but you won't have to worry about running out of time anymore.

The best way to get iron nuggets in Animal Crossing

The hardest part about mining in Animal Crossing is that whenever you hit the rock, your character will bounce back a few steps. This means that you'll have to waste time walking back up to the rock to hit it again.

To get around this, you can use a shovel to dig two holes near the rock. Digging holes in just the right spots will stop you from bouncing back, letting you strike the rock as fast as possible.

Check out the picture below for an example of how to dig your holes. You want to make a "corner" that you can stand in while striking the rock. The side you do it on doesn't matter.

Also make sure that there aren't any items, flowers, or weeds sitting directly next to the rock. If there's anything in the way, your rock won't drop as many items. And don't eat anything before you do this — if your character has any stamina, hitting a rock will destroy it instead of mining it.

Once you have your holes ready, stand between them and face the rock, then start mashing the A button. You'll see that no matter how many times you hit the rock, you stay in the same place.

Keep mashing until all eight materials have fallen out. Collect them all and fill your holes back in, then head to the next rock.

What to do if you run out of rocks in Animal Crossing

There's a decent chance that even mining every rock on your island won't get you all the iron nuggets you need. If you've exhausted all your rocks for the day, you can wait until tomorrow — or head to a different island.

If you leave your island and head to a friend's town, you can mine their rocks for iron nuggets too. And if that's not an option, you can head to a Mystery Island instead.

Mystery Islands are uninhabited islands that you can reach by giving the airport clerk Orville a Nook Miles Ticket. These islands are randomly generated and will always include new rocks for you to mine. They still only give eight materials each, but once you run out, you can head to a new Mystery Island for more.

Best of all, these rocks have even better chances of spawning iron nuggets. Every time you strike a Mystery Island rock, there's a 50 percent chance that an iron nugget will fall out.

You can buy a Nook Miles Ticket from the Nook Stop kiosk inside Resident Services. One ticket will cost you 2,000 Miles. Once you've got your ticket, go talk to Orville at the airport and say I wanna fly, and then Use Nook Miles Ticket. He'll send you to a new island where you can mine for iron.

Use the same method of digging holes, and you should have all the iron nuggets you need in no time.