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The feature wasn’t in the game at launch, but you can now swim and dive in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It isn’t that hard to do if you can follow a few simple steps. Here, we’ll walk you through where to get a wetsuit, how to swim and dive into the ocean, tips on swimming faster, and what to do with sea creatures. You’ll be a freestyle expert in no time.
How To Get A Wetsuit For Swimming
Requires: 3,000 bells
If you want to swim in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the first thing you need to do is buy a wetsuit. To buy a wetsuit, head over to Nook’s Cranny. The wetsuit will be available to purchase in the cabinet where you usually buy tools, seeds, and wallpaper/flooring.
The wetsuit costs 3,000 bells. You can also purchase a wetsuit from your Nook Stop terminal for 3,000 bells. They come in new designs daily, so you can keep checking back if you don’t like what you end up with. Your Nook Stop also offers a Nook Inc. wetsuit for 800 miles.
To equip the wetsuit, just select it in your inventory, press A, and select “Wear.” The wetsuit will be equipped directly over your clothes, so you don’t need to manually remove shirts or bottoms in order to wear it. Your shoes and any socks or tights may still be equipped though–you can still swim with them on, but if you want to take them off or swap them for something more beach-appropriate, you’ll have to do that manually.
Once your wetsuit is on, you’re ready to start swimming!
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How To Swim
Requires: Wetsuit
Once you purchase a wetsuit, Timmy and Tommy will give you a quick how-to on swimming, but if you skipped it on accident or don’t remember, we’ve run through the basics below.
How To Get In The Water
To swim, you need to head to one of your ocean’s beaches and get in the water first. There are two primary ways you can enter the ocean: wading in from the sandy beach, or diving in from either your beach rocks, that narrow strip of land that juts into the ocean, or your pier.
Either way, you’ll have to run up against the water and press A to enter the water. (You must have all tools unequipped.)
Swimming Controls
To keep swimming, press A. Each time you press A, you’ll do a stroke, but if you just hold A down, you’ll keep paddling. You can use the left stick to move around. If you don’t press anything, your character will just tread water. While treading, you can still use the analog stick to paddle lightly around, but you will move very slowly. Your character will never get tired of treading water, so don’t worry about floating around if you get tired of pressing A.
To swim fast, just keep tapping A while moving around in the water.
To exit the water, you have to swim back to a sandy beach. Just swim right up to the beach until your character reaches land and can walk out of the water.
How To Dive
Requires: Wetsuit
There’s no point in swimming in Animal Crossing: New Horizons if you don’t know how to dive.
To dive, just press Y while you’re in the water. Your character will dive under the waves, and from there, you can just use the usual swimming controls to move around–A to swim, joystick to move around. If you want to come back up to the surface, just hit Y again, but don’t worry–your character won’t run out of oxygen and will just come up for air when they need it, so you don’t have to time your dives.
How To Catch Sea Creatures
Requires: Wetsuit
The new swimming and diving features are all about exploring the ocean around your island, which means there are new sea creatures to catch and rare treasure to find. All you need for this is your wetsuit–no net or any other tools required!
When you’re swimming around, you might notice columns of bubbles floating up from beneath the waves. If you swim directly over the bubbles and press Y, your character will dive under and, if you positioned yourself right, come back up with a sea creature, like a sea star or a sea anemone. You can also find new types of vegetation, like seaweed.
Another way to catch sea creatures is to dive underwater and look for little shadows. When you dive, the camera will tilt and give you a better view of what’s below you. Those bubble columns and shadows line up, so an easier way to find creatures is to dive under and swim towards the shadows. Your character will automatically collect whatever’s down there once you reach the shadow.
In addition to the new sea creatures you can gather up for your Critterpedia and the museum, you will also find scallops and pearls. You can use pearls to craft certain DIY recipes, including the new mermaid-themed set. Scallops can be traded in to Pascal, a red otter who you will run into on one of your swims, for DIY recipes.
What To Do With New Sea Creatures
If you check your Critterpedia, you’ll find there’s a brand new tab for “sea creatures.” Anything you find on one of your underwater excursions will end up in this section, even if–as Blathers later explains–it isn’t exactly a “creature.” Seaweed, sea grapes, and other ocean plant life will get categorized here too. Check out our full list of all 40 sea creatures added in the new summer update.
Not only does the new swimming update mean new wildlife to log in your Critterpedia, but new things to donate to your museum as well. Blathers will gladly take any new sea creature or vegetation you find while diving as a donation to the museum.
You can also, as with any other wildlife find, place it as decoration. While most of what we’ve found so far will appear in a standard display tank, a few items like the seaweed have a unique placement style that you can use to decorate your island, so don’t forget to experiment!
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