Want the best price on turnips in Animal Crossing: New Horizons? Check out the Animal Crossing Turnip Exchange subreddit.
Turnips in Animal Crossing are one of those things that makes you sound like you are absolutely bonkers when you try to explain it. On Sundays, a character comes to your town selling turnips, which fluctuate randomly in price every week. You can then resell them at Timmy and Tommy Nook’s shop for bells, the currency for the game. Timmy and Tommy will have different selling points for turnips every day. Sometimes they’ll buy them for only a handful of bells; other days, they’ll buy turnips for hundreds. Gaming this system and trying to get the highest price for your turnips is called playing the “stalk market,” har dee har.
Videos by VICE
Because it’s relatively easier to visit other towns in New Horizons compared to previous Animal Crossing games, friends of mine have begun asking me for the turnip prices in my town. Often, a bunch of my friends will all flock to the town in our friend group with the highest price on turnips. The Animal Crossing Turnip Exchange subreddit is basically a much larger version of that same process. People post the price that turnips are going for in their town, their friend code, and then wait for other players to come through and sell their stalks.
In previous versions of Animal Crossing, visiting another players’ town was not super easy. The very first game required you to have a memory card of another players’ town to visit. Later entries would make use of the internet, but until the Switch, Nintendo’s online play systems are lackluster and cumbersome. It’s always been possible to play the stalk market this way, gaming the prices in other players’ towns. New Horizons just came out at the correct crossroads of Nintendo having an online service that more or less works, social media connecting players that otherwise would not have known each other, and a global pandemic forcing everyone to stay inside.
I don’t normally bother with turnips when I play Animal Crossing. Getting the right price always seemed like too much trouble. Now that I know about the Turnip Exchange, I might just try my hand at trading stalks.