When you arrive on the deserted island you’ll call home for the next few hundred or thousand hours it will be covered in dozens of trees. These might contain fruit, or they might not, but they’re all spread out around the place. Most players end up chopping these down and creating a more properly designed orchard, perhaps farming non-native fruit in the process. But while designing this for efficiency, you could be making a mistake. Here’s why your trees aren’t growing in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Why Your Trees Aren’t Growing

If your orchard looks like mine up above you may be asking this question. The ones on the outside grew up just fine. Was it that they didn’t get enough light or water? Not really. Here’s the thing, trees in Animal Crossing: New Horizons can thrive with just a single space between them, as I planted these and you likely planted yours. It’s the best way to harvest fruit after all. However, they won’t grow unless there’s a lot more empty space around them.

Two spaces from the nearest tree should be enough, though as you can tell, sometimes trees will grow with closer neighbors. And in the end, you want them to be a single space apart for a fruit orchard like this, so here’s what you should do instead. Growing trees should be done somewhere with more space, then you can transplant them to the orchard, placing them a single space apart in there.

To do this you just need to eat a piece of fruit then dig the fully grown tree up. You can place it anywhere in your orchard, giving it a single space or more if you wish. But the key is to grow trees with more space, then move them together once they’re ready. And that’s why your trees aren’t growing in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

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