How to get clay in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Aakrit Sharma
An Animal Crossing: New Horizons player hitting rocks to get clay

Animal Crossing: New Horizons offers a wide range of crafting materials including clay. If you’re looking forward to making items like the Ocarina and a Racoon Figurine, this guide on how to get clay in Animal Crossing: New Horizons will certainly help you.

The Animal Crossing: New Horizons community has always appreciated the game’s crafting mechanics, thanks to the abundance of crafting materials and recipes. To make your dream island, you’ll most likely need to spend hours collecting these materials and their recipes.

Clay is a popular crafting material among Animal Crossing: New Horizons players. You can either use it to make items like the Ocarina and pots or sell it for Bells and make a fortune.

On that note, here’s how to get clay in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Rock in Animal Crossing: New Horizons surrounded by clay

Best ways to get clay in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

You can get clay in Animal Crossing: New Horizons by hitting rocks on your island with an axe or a shovel. Having said that, when you hit a rock, it has an equal chance of dropping other crafting materials like iron nuggets, Bells, and rocks as well.

To improve these odds, you can go on Mystery Island Tours via Dodo Airlines. On Mystery Islands, you’ll not only get a higher drop rate for clay but also more variety of rocks to hit. However, this method will require you to accumulate a bunch of Nook Miles Tickets.

To stop your crafting materials from going too far away when you hit a rock, we recommend digging a hole near it first.

Floating balloon presents in Animal Crossing: New Horizons can also contain 5 pieces of clay but using them as your primary source isn’t a reliable strategy. This is because balloon presents can include a wide range of items.

As per player reports, blue balloons have the highest chance of dropping materials such as clay and iron nuggets. Hence, make sure to pop a blue balloon present in the game as soon as you see one.

Blue Balloon floating present in Animal Crossing: New Horizons that can contain clay

How to get Shovel or Axe in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Animal Crossing: New Horizons beginners can hand out insects or fish to Tom Nook and get DIY recipes for flimsy variants of tools like a Shovel or Axe. These tools are important for collecting resources like clay and with time and resources, you’ll be able to upgrade them too.


We hope this guide helps you get a ton of clay in Animal Crossing: New Horizons and craft your favorite clay-themed items. For similar content, make sure to check out how to get Collector’s Token in Marvel Snap, best Genshin Impact characters, and best Cookies in Cookie Run Kingdom.

Image Credits: Nintendo

About The Author

Aakrit is a games writer with over 2000 published articles for EssentiallySports, Sportskeeda, FortniteINTEL, and CharlieINTEL. Currently, he writes guides on Minecraft, Roblox, Pokemon games, Genshin Impact, and Brawlhalla. Aakrit loves playing shooter games and in his free time, you can find him queued up in Valorant, Fortnite, Apex Legends, or Halo Infinite. You can contact Aakrit at [email protected].