Help, I Have Too Many Nook Miles

Miles Lamevis.

Too Many nook Miles

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is probably the most robust and addicting Animal Crossing game to boot, it doling out enough rewards on a regular basis for you to come crawling back every day in search of that next fleeting dopamine hit.

One of the game’s best new mechanics, and a mechanic so good at player retention that Nintendo may wish they had introduced it sooner, are the Nook Miles. Given to you by the man himself and available from your NookPhone, Nook Miles are a different kind of currency to Bells, them allowing you buy certain things from Resident Services with them.

They’re also incredibly easy to amass, New Horizons doling them out to you like they’re candy for doing simple things like planting trees, cleaning up weeds, and so much more. When you unlock Nook Miles+, that’s when they will really come flooding in. For completing just a few simple challenges with there even being Miles multipliers for the first five of the day, you will be swimming in Nook Miles before long.

If you’re hunting down those 5 stars for your island, the Nook Miles are vital, allowing you to purchase fences and appealing scenery — two of the main criteria for reaching the maximum rating.

After buying absolutely everything in the catalogue and then chucking it on my island, I finally reached five stars. With my main objective complete, I looked forward to what else I would unlock with Nook Miles.

Animal Crossing new Horizons eyebrows
Animal Crossing new Horizons eyebrows

The answer: not much. I am currently sat on a grand total of 60,000 Nook Miles, a figure that would so obscene to Past Jimmy when he was scrimping and saving for a Nook Miles Ticket, just in the hopes of getting anything other than goddamn apples.

Sure, I could buy some Nook Miles Tickets and take part in the weird exchange system that’s similar to cigarettes in prison, but that seems like such a hassle. I just feel like I am accumulating these Nook Miles out of habit rather than any actual necessity.

Future updates may bring some future purpose to this Smaug mound of Nook Miles — at least I hope they do. I was quite surprised to discover that the game doesn’t rotate the Resident Services catalogue at all, the items staying the same apart from the fences on offer. That feels like a real waste.

There are so many other things you could do with excess Nook Miles. The ability to mass exchange them for Bells would make doing the challenges still worthwhile, though the exchange rate would have to be fairly low to not utterly break the economy. The economy in New Horizons has already been found to be pretty easily cheeseable, so Nintendo may have to be wary.

Or how about the ability to buy better equipment purely with Nook Miles? Say, 5000 Miles for one reinforced axe that cannot be found as a recipe? There needs to be something between the golden variety and everything else, a tool that can lost longer than 30 usages but less than the 90 the golden stuff offers. It feels like just too big a jump otherwise.

Until Nintendo come with a plan for what to do with Nook Miles in the long run (if they ever do, of course), I guess I will just glance at up an ever increasing number and buy yet another Monster Statue.

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