Great news, villagers! Animal Crossing is back! With Animal Crossing: New Horizons it’s time, once again, to gather materials, build your house, and learn the ins and outs of the game. After your first few days, you might feel a bit empty though. Where’s Isabelle? Is she even in New Horizons? The good news is, yes, she is. But it will take some time and effort on your part to get here to come. Our Animal Crossing: New Horizons Isabelle guide will run you through the steps to get Isabelle.
How To Get Isabelle in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Isabelle moves to your island when Resident Services tent gets upgraded to the Town Hall. To get to the Town Hall, you’ll first need to complete five objectives which will likely take you at least a week.
Have Blathers Move To Your Island
The first is easy and usually happens on your first day. Just get Blathers set up with a tent so he can move in! Once he does, he’ll explain his hopes to open a museum on the island.
Complete the Museum Construction
Now you’ll need 15 unique fossils or creatures before the museum can open. Just go around the island gathering bugs, fish, and fossils. If there aren’t enough, try using Nook Miles Tickets to visit mystery islands! After you do that, the museum will be built on the next day!
Build Nook’s Cranny
Now that the museum is out of the way, lets pivot to getting Nook’s Cranny open. To start with, you need to have taken and paid off your first loan with Tom Nook. Meaning you’ve paid the initial 5,000 Nook Miles.
After you’ve done that, Timmy and Tommy will ask you to construct a general store on the island. They’ll need 30 wood, 30 softwood, and 30 hardwood. On top of that you’ll have to find 30 iron nuggets from them. To get those, you’ll need to use that free Nook Miles Ticket and likely purchase more for 2,000 Nook Miles.
There are obviously lots of ways to get wood. If you don’t want to leave your own island, we recommend crafting a flimsy axe and hitting all of your trees each day until you have enough. The flimsy axe won’t fully chop down the trees so you can keep hitting them day after day. Be careful, a regular axe will fell trees on the third swing.
You can also use those Nook Miles Tickets to visit other islands and steal their resources. And while you don’t really have to do this for the wood, you’ll most certainly need to do it for the iron nuggets. These almost exclusively come from hitting mystery island rocks with your shovel.
As a reminder, dig a line of three holes behind the side of the rock you’re hitting. This way you don’t get knocked back and can get all nine hits in before the rock turns solid and stops giving out resources.
A warning: once you build Nook’s Cranny, Timmy won’t be in Nook’s tent any longer and you’ll only be able to sell items when they’re open. You can put items you want to sell in their drop box. However, it will only give you 80 percent of the normal value.
Construct a Bridge
At some point, Tom Nook will ask you to construct a bridge on the island. Make sure you have paid off your first house loan to him (the 100,000 Bells) and this should become available. He’ll basically walk you through a tutorial of the process though you won’t be able to construct more bridges until the Town Hall has been built.
Follow his instructions which involve gathering more resources and paying more money. The bridge will complete overnight once you’ve done so.
Add Three New Villagers to Your Island
Two villagers doesn’t make an island. If you want more friends, you’ll need to use some Nook Miles Tickets to visit other deserted islands. The main player on the Switch will encounter a single villager on the mystery island. They can be invited to your island simply by talking to them. You’re under no obligation to do so, however. If it’s not someone you want to settle down with, don’t invite them.
You have to do this three times before any of them can actually move onto your island.
Once you’ve invited three villagers, Tom Nook will talk to you about placing down their houses and ask you to prepare for their arrival. Each will also need three interior and three exterior items so they aren’t moving into a completely empty building.
After you’ve done all of this, on the following morning Tom Nook will announce that resident services is moving. The morning after that Resident Services will be closed and you’ll have to wait one more day for Isabelle and the Town Hall. Wake up once more and Isabelle will be waiting alongside Nook for the daily briefing.
And that’s it! Hopefully this helps you get settled into your new Animal Crossing: New Horizons island! Much like the game itself, check back throughout the day to see what’s new here on Fanbyte. We already have guides for how to move your tent and how to get across rivers using either the Pole Vault or constructing bridges. Later today we’ll have more guides up including how to get Nook’s Cranny, how to visit mystery islands, and buy and sell turnips!
