There are loads of ways to earn bells, the currency of Animal Crossing: Wild World. The easiest way is for you to just pick things up off the ground, putting them in your pockets and running off to Tom Nook’s store where he’ll gladly give you much less than what he would resell them for.

The key to foraging is that unlike fishing and butterfly catching, it takes no skill to forage. You see something; you pick it up. It’s that easy. Of course, you only have room to stuff 15 items in your pocket at any one time. If you don’t have a lot of time to invest in Animal Crossing: Wild World on a daily basis, what are the most cost-effective ways to stuff those empty pockets? Read on and find out the best way to spend 10 minutes.

See shells, grab shells
The easiest things to forage are shells, which you find along the shoreline. It only takes you about 1 minute to walk along the beach and pick up all the shells that you find washed up on the shore. With so many different varieties of shells, though, it’s difficult to predict what you’ll find, but one must assume that you’ll find the more common items (like the sand dollar and porceletta) than you will the valuable items (coral and conch). If you find 1 venus comb (150 bells), 5 Dall’s Tops (90 bells each), 6 porcelettas (30 bells), 1 coral (250 bells) and 2 sand dollars (60 bells), you end up with 1150 bells (69,000 bells per hour). Not bad for a minute’s work.

Blooming bells
There’s no law against picking flowers. Although it makes your town less beautiful, picking flowers can net you some quick bells from Nook at 40 bells per flower. It takes a little bit longer to forage for flowers than shells because flowers grow everywhere, but assuming you can find 15 flowers in 90 seconds, you could make an easy 600 bells (or 24,000 bells per hour), which is more like a thorn in your side than cash in your pocket. Do yourself a favour and just let the flowers grow.

Fruit, fruit, wonderful fruit
Your village is loaded with trees, many of which grow fruit ripe for the picking. Although you have to shake the tree to make the fruit fall, this barely takes any time. To pick 15 fruit, it takes less than 2 minutes. Tom Nook is willing to give you 100 bells for each piece, netting you 1500 bells (or 45,000 bells per hour).

Nook, however, has a real appetite for exotic fruit (fruit not native to your town). If you plant exotic fruit trees, Nook will pay you 500 for each new fruit you bring to him. Assuming it also takes 2 minutes to pick this fruit, the payment is 7500 bells (or 225,000 bells per hour) for a pocketful of fruit. Of course, with this, there are time start-up costs of obtaining the rare fruit (usually by trading fruit with one of your friends who also owns Animal Crossing: Wild World), planting the trees and waiting for the trees grow.

Buried treasure
Occasionally, you’ll find cracks in the ground, and when you dig at these cracks, you will often find a buried fossil. Tom Nook, a collector of rare artefacts that he is, will give you anywhere from 1000-5000 bells for a piece of history. That’s certainly a big number, but is fossil hunting worth your time if you’re looking for a quick, daily bell?

The first problem is finding the fossil. Although you can possibly find it right away, odds are you’ll have to run through town a little bit which could take more than 2 minutes. The digging time isn’t very long, but for the fossil to gain value, Blathers at the Museum must identify it. After he looks at it, explains what it is and gives you a guilt trip for not donating it, you’ve spent more than 3 minutes on a fossil that may bring on average 3500 bells (70,000 bells per hour).

You may find more than one fossil in your hunt, but each fossil you find adds to the time spent foraging. Instead of a fossil, you may find a Gyroid, which is less valuable to Tom Nook (although you save time by not having to take it to Blathers to identify). All in all, fossil hunting isn’t worth the daily grind.

The bell tree
Maybe you’ve been told that money doesn’t grow on trees. In Animal Crossing: Wild World, money CAN grow on trees. There’s risk involved, but it’s the best foraging option for your time. To plant a bell tree, you need a golden shovel. You get this shovel by burying a shovel in the ground, waiting a couple days and then digging it up with a second, purchased shovel. Once you have the golden shovel, you dig a hole with it, bury any number of bells and water that spot like you would a tree. If after a couple days the bell tree grows and blooms, it will give you three ‘fruit’ equal to the amount of fruit you buried.

Compared with our other fruits, you would need to only plant 501 bells to make more bells per hour than the other foraging methods. However, if you dump 501 bells into the ground, there’s little chance of the tree growing. You’ve got to show the ground some respect.

And the best use of time is…
With foraging, all you’re spending is your time; there’s no overhead, no costs and no employees to pay. But time is money, or bells in this case. To use your time the most efficiently, it’s worth the effort to grow the bell tree. If you don’t want to take the risk, find a friend and introduce exotic fruit to your town. If you’d rather just let nature take its course, take a stroll along the beach or go treasure hunting. Your native fruit is nice and tasty, but it’s often sweeter when you’re not the one picking it. And flowers, well, they’re for smelling, not selling.

Hopefully, you’ll make time to do all these things, and pick weeds, and talk to your neighbours, and design shirts, and….