Might ruin your chance to collect supplies
Fruit has been a staple of the Animal Crossing franchise from the outset, but it really hasn’t served much of a purpose. Sometimes villagers request it from you and you can always sell it at Nook’s Cranny, but beyond that and the rotten fruit that was introduced in New Leaf, it hasn’t had much use. Eating it has merely been something to do, until now.
Fruit can still be sold for bells or buried to make new fruit trees, but when you eat fruit in New Horizons, you gain limited-use super strength. For each piece you get, you get one powerful strike. This is an incredibly powerful tool if there are boulders on your island you’d wish rather not be there. Eat a piece of fruit and give the rock one good whack with your shovel and it’ll shatter into pieces. If you’re lucky enough to break a money rock, you’ll earn all the bells inside of it.
However, if you’re trying to load up on materials for crafting, you’ll want to be careful about when you eat a piece of fruit. As in prior games, hitting a boulder with a shovel multiple times will net you a few different types of materials, including rocks, clay, metal, and occasionally gold. But if you shatter it before gathering all those crafting materials, there’s no way to get those materials back. Destroyed boulders will reappear on your island over the next few days.
You’ll want to keep this in mind when you visit random islands to gather materials. These trips, which cost 2,000 Nook Miles, are a great resource of wood and stone supplies, as well as exotic fish and bugs you might not be able to catch on your island.
Another word of advice: craft the stone ax as soon as you can. Trees on your island grant you wood crafting materials when hit, but hitting them with a metal ax will cut them down. Hitting them with a stone ax, which is far more powerful than the flimsy ax, will allow you to collect the wood without losing the tree.
