Animal Crossing: New Horizons – What to do with Friends

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is mostly a single player game, but just like its predecessors, it has a ton of co-op and multiplayer options. There’s tons of things you can do with your friends, either on your own island or by visiting their’s. The game shows you how to do all this stuff, but once you get together you might start to wonder why people try so hard to connect like this. Let’s explain what to do with friends in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

What to do with Friends

In case you’re still working through the convoluted systems at the heart of Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ multiplayer check out our walkthrough. Once you’re set up and ready to go you might join up and find that there isn’t some new mechanic added when a new player comes to your island. Pretty much all you’ve done is added someone else who can do all the same stuff as you. At least, they can if you make them a Best Friend.

Once that’s all set up and you’re together either on your own island or their’s you’re pretty much free to explore and do whatever you want. For single system co-op you have to stay on the same screen, so what you can do in that situation is much more limited. But with online and local play the new players just makes it so you can’t pick up outdoor items and a few other small limitations.

So what is there to do with these friends you worked so hard to get together? Not a lot of specific activities, but the answer is really “whatever you want to do.” I love going fishing with my friends, watching them reel in a big one, or seeing their reaction when I pull up my fifth horse macheral in a row. Exploring together can be fun too, or helping each other collect resources like wood and iron nuggets.

You can also share items, tools, and resources. One thing that I’ve already set up is a group chat where we share each other’s turnip prices for the day. When someone gets a big one we all jump in and sell all we bought last Sunday. It’s a great way to come together and celebrate our victory over the dreaded Stalk Market. It’s also nice to go to a friends island to sell your native fruit, or allow them to do the same. They fetch three times as much when sold somewhere else, so it’s another great way to make a lot of Bells.

Some events will allow for interacting with other players, presumably, but we’ll have to wait for those to occur before we know for sure. Until then the answer for what to do with friends in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is pretty much wide open. That may seem limiting to some who expected a definite multiplayer mode of sorts, pitting players against each other or directing them to work together on the same task. But that’s not how this series works.