Animal Crossing: New Horizons: How To Swim

A deep dive into the new mechanic.

New Horizons swimming
New Horizons swimming

From Our New Horizons Wiki

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If you’ve been wishing for some substantial updates to bring you back into the Animal Crossing: New Horizons way of life, Nintendo have listened with their July update. After downloading the patch, you can now swim in the water around your island.

Once you load up the game, Isabelle will inform you of the change. You will find a snorkel in your letterbox, which is very handy for deep diving in real life but is just generally a cool little aesthetic item to get in New Horizons.

To start swimming, you need a wetsuit. Venture on over to Nook’s Cranny and buy one for 3000 Bells, or pick one up from Nook Shopping for 800 Nook Miles. The design of your wetsuit is entirely random.

New Horizons swimming
New Horizons swimming

Wear the wetsuit and then approach the water surrounding your island — you unfortunately cannot go diving in a pond. Press A to keep swimming faster and then Y to dive.

You should dive whenever you see bubbles on the surface of the water, and then a black shadow on the bottom. You don’t need to press anything else and your character should then automatically pick up one of the many sea creatures.

You can also find scallops to give to Pascal, the new vendor for July, who will pop up randomly when you pick up a scallop. Pascal will give you one DIY recipe a day when you donate a scallop and will only appear once daily.

Swimming in New Horizons is definitely one of the better updates we’ve had since the game launched, and it will certainly give players dozens more hours of playtime. Are you going to be diving back into the game?

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is out now exclusively for the Nintendo Switch. From our review:

“New Horizons is a great continuation of an already fantastic series of games, and paying back Tom Nook’s loan has never been so fun.”

MORE NEW HORIZONS: Animal Crossing: New Horizons: How To Predict Turnip Prices

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