If you’re an Animal Crossing player looking to get a golden shovel, then you’re in luck. Thanks to YouTuber Toes-Oh, there’s a way to speed up the process of obtaining the golden shovel in the game. However, it does require time traveling, so if that’s something you’re not comfortable with, then this method may not be for you.
To get the golden shovel, you must help Gulliver over 30 different occasions by digging up five Communicator parts to fix his phone. Unfortunately, the spawn pattern of Gulliver seems to be completely random, making this challenge even harder. But once you do manage to find him either naturally or by skipping a day forward until he’s there, you must take note of the date that you find him.
To get started, you need to find Gulliver and save him as you usually would. Then save the game and exit, return home, and close the game. After that, go into your settings, and turn your clock exactly one day forward or backward. Both methods work, but there are rarely inconsistencies with both of them.
Open your game again after it loads, start your file, then save and exit right away, and close the game once more. Now go back to the date that you originally had Gulliver. If you went forward, go back again, and vice-versa. Start the game, and you will then be able to find Gulliver and help him once again in under five minutes. If done correctly, you can use this method over and over to help Gulliver over 30 times and finally get the gold shovel.
Your Nook Miles achievement will keep track of how many times you’ve helped him up to 20 times. After this, you are left to count on your own. Once you’ve helped him 30 times, the next gift he will send you in the mail will be the gold shovel recipe along with a nice message. If you’re unsure whether you hit 30 or not, remember to check your mail every time you go forward.
It is important to note that the fastest trip out of the ones recorded was six and a half minutes. If you round this up to seven, you could do nine or ten runs in an hour. However, finding all the communicator parts varies in how long it takes. My recommendation for this is to walk along all your beaches to give the water some time to spit out of the ground. If you’re really not getting lucky, go ahead and enter a building and then exit it again to reset the spawns.
In non-stop play, you can roughly get this done from scratch in five hours or less. Before wrapping up, there are a few tips to keep in mind. The first is to avoid going too far ahead when you’re doing this. Also, Gulliver will spawn on a different area of the beach each time you do this trick, so keep that in mind when searching for him. Lastly, to save time, you don’t need to let the game go back to the title screen for saving; you can actually cut it off right when the screen shows up that says it’s already saved.
With these tips and tricks, you should now be able to get the golden shovel in Animal Crossing faster than you thought possible. Stay tuned for more guides on how to obtain other gold tools in the game.