Let’s Face It, Turnip Prices Are Totally Broken In ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’

animal Crossing: New Horizons

Credit: Nintendo

If you want to understand wealth consolidation under late capitalism, look to the stalk market. Three weeks ago, I was sitting pretty in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I had a little over 600,000 bells, enough to buy basically anything I wanted in the game. Rather than enjoy my nest egg, however, I fell for the siren song of Daisy Mae, wandering my island with white gold on her head. I put it all in turnips, and by the end of the week I had 2 million bells. I did it again the next week, and the week after that. I’ve now got 6 million bells in the bank with all my loans paid off, even the mostly pointless last one. It doesn’t matter. I bought turnips today. The more bells I have, the more bells I can make. More bells, always.

It seems like Turnips in this game are meant to act like something of a risky asset. They cost a lot of money, and if you sell at the right time, you could maybe double your investment. Sell at the wrong time, however, and you’ll wind up taking hefty losses. Wait too long, and your return quickly drops to zero. Sometimes, if you’re very lucky, you might get a massive windfall by selling at 6 times the price you bought at. Such times are rare. You can use Turnip calculators to predict trends, but there’s not much upside in a down market. Some weeks and you might not see a profit at all.

That’s the ideal system, I think. That’s not how it works in the game right now.

The problem is, everyone in the game has a different price on their island, which means that on any given week there is no shortage of players experiencing a massive price spike, and anyone who wants can go sell on that island. It’s easy to imagine a world where these players are harder to find, but it’s not the world we’re living in. Hop on Turnip Exchange, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, really any old social network: you’ll find a way to offload your turnips at 500+ bells a pop.

So the upshot is that not only is there never really any reason to lose money on turnips, there’s never really any reason not to see a colossal return, enough to turn even the most moderate fortune into a true hoard within two weeks. The rest of the economy is meaningless next to turnips, the only true way to build wealth, akin to working for minimum wage while traders shift fortunes worth more money than you and everyone you’ve ever met will see in their lifetimes. Sure, you can get a Tarantula for 8,000 bells, sell it to Flick for 16,000. How quaint. I can get 3 million from one trip to the Nook Brothers. But that’s nice about your tarantula.

I like to think Nintendo thought to include this depiction of a dangerously lopsided economy in its game on purpose, though it seems unlikely. More likely is that the developer just didn’t quite count on the impact of widespread social media on its in-game stocks and accidentally made a game that simulates the essential imbalance between capital and labor. I have no turned my economic attention to less tangible assets, like art and rare flowers. But I’ll keep amassing bells, because even in a virtual world I cannot stretch my imagination far enough to a place where I would not want more money.