Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) Guides

How To Upgrade & Expand Nook’s Cranny

The Nook’s Cranny shop in Animal Crossing: New Horizons can be expanded into a far more prestigious shop with enough time and effort! Learn how to upgrade and expand Nook’s Cranny to the second version in this guide.

How To Build The First Nook’s Cranny

Before you can upgrade Nook’s Cranny to the next level, you’ll obviously need to have built the first version of the store. This is pretty easily accomplished in your first few days of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but we’ll briefly cover it just in case. If you already have, just skip to the next section.

To build the first Nook’s Cranny shop, you need to first pay off your initial tent loan using 5,000 Nook Miles. These can be easily achieved by completing Nook Miles challenges like popping balloons and catching fish. This can be easily completed on your first day.

The day after your initial loan has been completed, walk into the Resident Services tent and speak with Timmy & Tommy. They’ll let you in on their enterprising business plan to open their own Nook’s Cranny shop on the island. To build the store, you need to collect 30 Wood, 30 Softwood, 30 Hardwood, and 30 Iron Nuggets crafting materials.

When you have all of the required resources listed above, head back to Resident Services and hand the crafting materials you gathered to Timmy & Tommy to begin construction. You can choose where to place Nook’s Cranny, but don’t worry, you can move it anywhere else once the Town Hall is built.

Benefits & Perks Of The Upgraded Nook’s Cranny

The upgraded and expanded version of Nook’s Cranny offers a number of benefits over the original version, not to mention the greatly improved aesthetic! Whereas the initial building looks a bit run down, the upgraded shop has a more stylish look and features new music.

Greater Selection of Expensive Furniture

The variety of furniture available in Nook’s Cranny greatly increases with the upgraded expansion bringing new items that can’t be found in the first iteration of the shop! Some of this new furniture is vastly more expensive than previous items, like computers that cost over 100,000 Bells.

New Exclusive Timer Tool For Multiplayer

A new handy Timer tool item is available exclusively in the upgraded form of Nook’s Cranny! By purchasing and using the Timer, you can create fun fishing and bug catching competitions in multiplayer with your friends online.

The Timer can be set to a 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or 15 minutes duration and counts all of the bugs or fish that each player collects during the time. Afterwards, the totals for every player are revealed to crown a winner!

Nicer Tool Designs

Although they’re purely cosmetic, some advanced new tool designs can be purchased at the expanded Nook’s Cranny store. These tools tend to feature various patterns or other nicer design features than the ones you can craft yourself at a workbench.

How To Unlock The Nook’s Cranny Expansion Upgrade

There are three main requirements you need to meet to upgrade and expand the Nook’s Cranny store in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, here’s what they are and how to accomplish them all.

Fair warning though — this unlock takes a significant amount of time and won’t come easy, unlike past Animal Crossing games where the first store upgrade could be unlocked in under two weeks with minimal spending.

Play For 30 Days After Nook’s Cranny Is Built

To unlock the Nook’s Cranny expansion in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you’ll need to have played for 30 days since the initial Nook’s Cranny was built on your island.

For most players, the first Nook’s Cranny was likely built on their third or fourth day of playing. So if you take the date that you first began playing Animal Crossing: Horizons and add around 33-34 days, it’s like you’ll hit the Nook’s Cranny expansion unlock criteria around then.

Buy & Sell At Least 200,000 Bells Of Goods

For Nook’s Cranny to upgrade in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you need to spend or earn a healthy amount of money with Timmy & Tommy in the shop. Specifically, you need to have bought or sold at least 200,000 Bells worth of items so far.

This can included simple common tasks like selling fish or bugs to Timmy & Tommy, so it’s not particularly hard to reach this goal if you’ve been actively playing the game. Most players should naturally reach this before hitting the time gate mentioned earlier.

If you want to be extra certain you reach this though, be sure to buy all of the furniture items in stock at Nook’s Cranny every day. We recommend doing this anyway to help fill up your Nook Shopping catalog with lots of items, which is helpful for Nook Miles achievements and having a variety of items to re-order!

Have Mabel Visit Your Island

The third and final requirement to expand Nook’s Cranny is to have Mabel visit your island outside Resident Services at least once.

To be honest, this is a near meaningless requirement as it’s virtually guaranteed that Mabel will have already visited your island multiple by the 30 day mark. Most players will have built the Able Sisters shop already too, which requires Mabel to have visited multiple times.

We’ll just add that it would probably be wise to speak to Mabel at least once to be absolutely certain the requirement is fulfilled. So if you haven’t already spoken to her, make sure to do so next time she visits your island.

Expansion Time

After all three unlock requirements listed above for the upgraded Nook’s Cranny have been achieved, an announcement will be made by Isabelle in the morning letting you know that the shop will be closed the next day!

Annoyingly, this means Nook’s Cranny will be completely unavailable to sell or buy items that day until it opens fully expanded the next day after. We recommend visiting a friend’s online if you can to get yourself access to a shop for selling items during the downtime.

How To Upgrade Nook’s Cranny Further

Unfortunately, there are no more expansions or upgrades for Nook’s Cranny that can be unlocked in Animal Crossing: New Horizons after achieving the version pictured in this guide. Data found in the game’s code confirms this to be the case, so this is not simply based on speculation.

For some Animal Crossing fans, this could be quite the disappointment as previous games in series featured either four or five different upgrade levels of the Nook’s or Nookling shops, like Nook N’ Go and Nookway.

It’s possible that additional store upgrades will be released in a future Animal Crossing: New Horizons free content update and we suspect that’s exactly what will happen.

Special thanks to Ninji for some information used in this guide.