Animal Crossing Turnip Merchanting

Animal Crossing is a game where the player lives out their life in a virtual style, set out on their own and put into a town of all animals while the player is the only human. There are two animal crossing games, Animal Crossing: Population Growing and Animal Crossing: City Folk. The best way for a player to make money in this game is with turnip merchanting.

Animal Crossing: Population Growing has a very simple method of buying turnips; every Sunday Johan the turnip merchant will visit the player’s town and sell turnips for a random price. Then every day after Sunday the town shop owner Tom Nook will buy those turnips for a random price. Once one week has past (that next Sunday) the turnips will spoil and won’t be worth a dime. The trick is to predict the best time to sell the player’s turnips to make money, lose little money or if they completely forgot, end up wasting all of the money spent on turnips.

Later in the series this becomes harder and harder when playing Animal Crossing: City Folk. For the most part it is still the same, Johan comes every Sunday offering turnips for a random price. Johan will also ask the player if they would like to buy a red turnip. The red turnips will always cost 1000 each and can be sold for 20000 each. The trick with the red turnip is the player will need to plant it, and water it each day for a week so on that next Sunday the player can sell the red turnip. If they miss one day of watering, the turnip will go bad and cannot be sold at that point. Another complication with turnip selling in Animal Crossing: City Folk is Tom Nook will not always buy turnips for one set price a day, Tom Nook offers two different prices each day, one in the morning between 6am-10am and in the afternoon between 11am-11pm, which can double the chance of the player to screw up or make a lot of money.

While Animal Crossing: City Folk does offer more ways for the player to make money with turnips, it is also much more complicated than Animal Crossing: Population Growing making it easier for the player to lose money.

Each game offers its own way to allow the player to make money with turnips. Animal Crossing: City Folk offer’s a more complicated way with red turnips and two turnip prices a day. Animal Crossing: Population Growing offers simpler ways with only one turnip price per day and no red turnips.