Animal Crossing New Horizons Nerfs Bug Moneymaking, Says Dataminer

According to an Animal Crossing New Horizons dataminer, the developers have been changing up the spawn rates of certain insect species, mainly those that players used to farm Bells fast, like scorpions, tarantulas, and certain butterflies. Also, they’ve made spawn rates of all insects unified, further restricting player ability to get money quickly. All of this is presumably in order to balance the game’s economy.

There have been some upsets hitting the overall economy of Animal Crossing New Horizons, as Nintendo are doing their best to fine-tune it. They’ve already tinkered with the Bank of Nook and the Stalk Market to balance things out. However, that’s not the only thing they’ve changed. According to dataminer @_Ninji, the developers have also introduced some nerfs to insects that many players have been using to make bank, like tarantulas, atlas moths, emperor and peacock butterflies, etc. Meanwhile, they’ve increased spawn rates of the likes of stinkbugs. Great.

So, what exactly has Ninji discovered? Well, for one, it seems that the spawn rates of all insects have been unified. What that means in practice is that there will no longer be a specific month where bugs appear more often. Instead, they’ll have a flat spawn rate across all months when they’re programmed to appear. For example, if a bug is supposed to appear in March, April, and May, it might have been appearing more often in April. That will no longer be the case; the spawns will be equal across all three months.

Meanwhile, as we’ve already mentioned, spawn rates of certain insect species have been slashed. According to Ninji: “Peacock butterflies have been cut by 80-90%; emperors and atlas moths by 50%. Regular stinkbugs are up 100%, man-faced ones down 50%. Tiger beetles up by 33%, Scarab beetles down 40%.” You can find the full table of changes here. So, yeah, there you have it. You might have to find new ways to farm Bells.