Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Blathers & Museum guide

Stefan L 20/03/20 Comments Closed

Everyone’s favourite museum curating owl is back in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but he’s not on your island expedition from the very beginning, and when he does arrive, he won’t have a museum to start with! Here’s how you can help him out on his journey of discovery.

Looking for how to add an art gallery to the island museum? Head here for our dedicated art gallery guide.

How to bring Blathers to your island

Bringing Blathers to your island is one of the very first things you do. Simply follow the missions that Tom Nook gives you in the game’s prologue to place your tent, help your new neighbours and prepare for the party with stick and fruit collecting.

Once you’ve slept and get to your first full day, you can now speak to Tom Nook about using his crafting table. He will gift you the DIY recipe for a variety of different things, including a Flimsy Net and Flimsy Fishing Rod, and ask you to bring him any of the things that you catch.

For each new creature that you bring him, he’ll ask if he can send it on to a “friend” of his, and reward you with new items and DIY recipes if you accept. Once you’ve brought him five creatures, he’ll receive a phone call… it’s Blathers! He wants to come join you!

Where to look for fish and bugs

Wildlife is all around you in Animal Crossing, but you need to know where to look.

You’ll find fish in any body of water. Practice casting your fishing line to land just in front of them and be patient. Fish might take a couple nibbles before they bite, dragging the lure below the water. Now just hammer the A button until they’re caught.

For all the bugs, you’ll want to try and snag them in a net:

During the day, butterflies will gently flutter around. Snag them in your net!
At night, you’ll almost always find a moth by the light outside the Resident Services tent.
You can find snails camping out on rocks, especially when it’s raining.
At night, conch-like shells on the beach might turn out to be hermit crabs. Grab them in your net.
Smack a rock with a shovel, and pillbugs or centipedes might appear.
Shake trees and eventually bagworms and spiders might drop out, giving you a chance to quickly snag them in your net.
Be careful when shaking trees, as you might knock a wasps nest to the floor. React quickly with a net to catch the wasps before they sting you!
Beware of tarantulas at night, which will chase and bite you if they spot you… but you can catch them with quick reactions!

How can you tell if you’ve caught something new? Well, as your villager presents your catch to you, they’ll shout “Yes!” if it’s a new catch. If it isn’t, they’ll just dive straight into saying what it is. You can also check in your NookPhone Critterpedia to see what you’ve caught and what you’ve donated to him.

Settle Blathers on your island

With Blathers on the way, Nook will hand you a tent and ask you to find a spot for him and any museum he wants to build. When choosing a spot, think about the size of the site, which is much wider than the tents you’ll have pitched so far. Once you’re happy with the spot, just set it down and Blathers will appear the next morning.

During this time, Tom Nook won’t accept any more donations, but you’ll want to try and hold onto them (you can drop bugs and fish in little boxes) and submit them to Blathers when he arrives.

We’ve got plenty of other walkthroughs and tips for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and more on the way. Visit our game hub to check those out.

Build a museum

Blathers is here on an expedition, trying to prove the worth of building a museum to gather information on your island. In order to justify this, he needs to collect 15 more insects, fish and… fossils!

But how can you gather fossils without a shovel? Luckily it’s Blathers who will send you the DIY recipes, and not just for a shovel, but also a river-vaulting pole so that you can get to more parts of the island.

Continue collecting things for Blathers and eventually he’ll have enough to justify building a museum. At this point he’ll stop accepting donations, construction will begin the next day, and the museum will open the day after that.

What to do in the meantime? Well, you should probably have upgraded from a tent to a house by this point, so make sure to store any newly discovered fish, insects and fossils in your home’s built in storage, so you can donate them once Blathers has his museum up and running. At this point, he’ll thankfully start accepting donations and requests for fossil assessment in bulk.