Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) Guides

How to Get & Catch Ants or Flies

Ants & Flies are both tricky bugs to get in Animal Crossing: New Horizons and require a couple tricks to catch! Learn how to find and catch those pesky insects in this guide.

While neither ants or flies make for particularly worthwhile bugs to sell at Nook’s Cranny for bells, it’s essential that you catch each bug at least once and donate them to the Museum for completion of the bug section!

How To Get Ants

The only way we know of to find and catch an ant in Animal Crossing: New Horizons right now is to purchase Turnips from Daisy Mae. While past Animal Crossing games had other items like candy or rotten fruit that could spawn ants, these items don’t yet appear to exist in New Horizons!

If you’re not already familiar with Turnips, you can purchase them every Sunday morning from 5AM to 12PM when Daisy Mae visits your island. Even if you’re not interested in playing the ‘Stalk Market’, you will want to purchase at least one batch of 10 turnips on Sunday to catch an ant.

Once you’ve got some turnips, it’s pretty much cruise control from here out because you’ll want your turnips to turn rotten. To do this, let the entire week pass by until next Sunday without selling the turnips, and they’ll become rotten!

If you actually playing the ‘Stalk Market’ though, make sure to only sacrifice a set of 10 Turnips as that’s the minimum possible size. Don’t let an entire stack of 100 Turnips rot when you don’t need to — simply use the Grab 10 button!

When you’ve got some tasty Rotten Turnips, simply drop them on the ground somewhere outside and walk away a short distance before coming back. If you still don’t see any Ants, try entering and exiting a nearby building like your house to trigger the spawn.

If everything goes according to plan, you should find a lovely trail of ants coming out of ant hill and swarming all over your delicious Rotten Turnips. Simply take your net tool out and catch the Ants sitting on the turnips!

How To Get A Fly

The easiest way to find and catch a fly in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is to place an item considered trash outside on the ground. These items may look incredibly ugly, but they’re invaluable help if you wish to get your own fly to donate!

Once you’ve placed a trash item down on the floor outside, it’s now possible for a Fly to appear on the item or nearby. Note that there is a chance for this to occur — it’s not guaranteed to happen immediately.

One strategy to find the Fly is to simply leave the trash outside a location you often pass by and just wait until eventually the fly appears. This could take a couple hours or days until you finally spot one though.

However if you’re in a hurry, there’s another strategy we recommend trying: place your trash items from a location that you can easily enter and leave repeatedly. We placed three trash items about a screen away from the Museum, and traveled back and forth between the two locations.

After about three tries, we found our first Fly when leaving the Museum. We caught that one, and then tried entering/leaving the Museum another four or so times before finding a second Fly. It might be a little annoying, but you’re sure to find the Fly soon by using this strategy!

How To Get Trash Items

The following items are all considered trash and have the chance to spawn a Fly creature nearby. You can get these trash items randomly from fishing in the river or the ocean, although in our experience they’re more commonly found in the river.

• Boot
• Can
• Old Tire