Animal Crossing fruit: Grow back time, eating benefits and how to plant fruit trees in New Horizons

Fruit in Animal Crossing has been a financial and aesthetic staple in the series - and now it's a dietary one.

Fruit is a tried and tested method of money making - so learning how to plant fruit trees and how long fruit takes to grow back is useful in knowing when your next influx of cash is coming in.

New Horizons also has a new purpose for fruit - eating - which offers some benefits that can be useful for managing your island.

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Animal Crossing fruit explained: Eating fruit benefits and what else to do with fruit in New Horizons explained

Every island has fruit growing on its island, which can be removed by shaking the tree. Fruit has three uses:

• Eating to give you energy - Eating fruit gives you one point of stamina. Each point allows you to do two things with tools - one is break open rocks by using an axe (destroying it permanently - not ideal if you still need nuggets!) or uprooting an entire tree with a shovel (useful for relocating trees). Each action uses up a point of energy, and you have 10 points of energy stored up at a time.

• Selling in the store for Bells - Selling fruit from your island is an easy and regular source of income, since a fruit tree will keep producing fruit over time. If you have fruit from another island, it's worth five times as much as your native variety. Coconuts, meanwhile, are always worth 250 Bells.
• Replanting to grow new fruit trees - You can plant fruit to grow a new Fruit tree in its place - which is useful if you want more of a different and thus more lucrative fruit.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Our Best Tips and Tricks for Getting Started

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Here's more on these latter two points...

How to get different fruit varieties in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

As well as the fruit which grows on your island, there are five other types available out there to collect and grow. Not only does this give you Nook Miles as a reward, but selling fruit which isn't native to your island yields a higher price to your own - 500 versus the usual 100.

These varieties are:

• Apples
• Cherries
• Peaches
• Coconuts (sells for 250 Bells regardless)
• Pears
• Oranges

There are two ways to get other varieties beyond what grows on your island originally:

• Visit a friend in Animal Crossing multiplayer who has a different variety. Your starting fruit is randomised, but chances are, they will be different to yours. Shake them off a tree or buy them from the shop so you have your own to keep.
• Visit the Mystery Island. You can buy a Ticket to these with Nook Miles once the airport is open, and Mystery Islands often have one different variety growing there - particularly useful if online friends are difficult to access. There is also the Coconut, a fruit exclusive to these islands, which will also grow there regardless.

How to plant fruit trees in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Once you have the fruit you want to plant - whether it's from your own island or someone else's - equip a Shovel and dig a hole in the ground where you want the three to be planted.

Now enter your inventory and highlight the fruit. Select 'Plant 1', and a sampling with begin to grow.

Remember to keep trees around three holes away from another tree in order for them to grow. Additionally, Coconuts only grow in sand, so plant them on the beach - which is a useful way to make use of that beautiful, if often barren, real estate.

The Animal Crossing 2.0 update and Happy Home Paradise is here! We can help you with the new additions - including where to find Brewster, Gyroids, new villagers, ordinances, new fences, storage shed, new hairstyles, Froggy Chair, group stretching and Kapp'n boat tours. Cooking is now unlockable, so you need to know how to make both flour and sugar, as well as how to grow carrots, potatoes and tomatoes. Meanwhile, if you're new to Animal Crossing, our New Horizons tips can help with the basics. From the off, there's fish and bugs to catch, flowers and fruit to grow with. One long term goal is building your Happy Home Academy score. Finally, you need tools such as the new ladder and vaulting pole to fully explore.

How long it takes for fruit take to grow back - and for fruit trees to grow - in Animal Crossing: New Horizons explained

Once you have shaken fruit from a tree, the branches will be bear for a short time.

Based on previous Animal Crossing games, fruit takes three days to grow back. Fruit not originally from your island can usually take a little longer - up to five or six days.

As for new fruit trees you have planted, trees take three days to grow, followed by an additional day to bear fruit - again, based on timings seen in previous games in the series.

A top tip if you wait to avoid this lengthy process is thanks to one of the new abilities you gain from eating fruit. If you eat one fruit to grow your strength, you can unearth a tree with a Shovel in a single go, placing it on your inventory.

You can then plant the fruit tree in its entirety back on your island - skipping that three day growing step entirely.