If you want to score some bells and pay down your debts in Animal Crossing: New Horizons as quickly as possible without spending hours catching individual bugs and fish, one way to do it is by playing the highly volatile Stalk Market and hawking turnips at a premium. This typically involves either dumb luck, coordination with friends on neighbouring islands, or tracking one of a number of patterns that are thought to indicate when you might get a good price on turnips—or a combination of all three. But now, a website exists to crunch some of those numbers for you and predict the highest possible selling price.
A quick recap of how the Stalk Market works: After establishing your island and building the Nook’s Cranny shop, you’ll be visited on Sundays by turnip merchant Daisy Mae. Buying some of her turnips will allow you to turn around and sell them Monday-Saturday to raccoon twins Timmy and Tommy at a potentially higher price at Nook’s Cranny. Prices change each morning and at noon, making two possible selling prices each day for the rest of the week (other than Sunday). And you do need to sell them if you hope to make any of that money back—either at a loss or at a premium. They rot if kept longer than a week, meaning your precious bells—the currency on your island—were wasted on bad vegetables.
You should be keeping an eye on price fluctuations to know when to sell. But some gamers have managed to identify patterns for predicting price increases and decreases. Polygon, for example, broke down the patterns into four primary trends: decreasing trend, random trend, small spike trend, and large spike trend. It’s a good system if you don’t mind doing a little mental maths for your forecasting. But now, a website will do it for you. The forecaster will service up predictions within a given price range for what you can expect on both the high and low ends.
Mike Bryant—who developed the tool with data identified by a fellow player, Ninja, in the game’s code—told Motherboard, however, that it isn’t meant to work during the first week you purchased turnips from Daisy Mae. Based on the experiences of several Gizmodo staff who used the tool to check their prices—including when they changed at noon ET on Tuesday—the forecaster was fairly successful at predicting prices. Bryant told Motherboard that some gamers reported getting turnip prices outside the price ranges, so the tool may not be totally foolproof. It will, however, be an easier way for you to get an idea of how Stalk Market fluctuations work.
Listen, none of us wants to be beholden to Tom Nook or his twin minions to get by in Animal Crossing. But if you plan to ever secure that coveted 5-star rating for your island in New Horizons—and pay off all those infrastructure builds and home expansions—this is one way to do it. You may as well take all the help you can get along the way to stacking those bells.