This trick is simply genius.
Crafting is a major feature in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, allowing you to collect a wide variety of DIY recipes for furniture and accessory items such as tables, chairs, flooring, and rugs.
While there are tons of different DIY recipes to collect, the longer you play the game, the more likely it is that you’ll come across duplicate recipes you don’t need. These recipes can be sold for a few Bells at Nook’s Cranny, but many players like keeping these recipes in order to give them to friends or trade them for something they do need.
There’s a big problem, however: You can’t store DIY recipe cards in your in-home storage. As a result, many players have covered their floors and islands with extra recipes, which isn’t ideal.
Recently, we spotted a clever trick on social media that was too good not to share: you can store your DIY recipes in the recycle box in the Resident Services building (We’re not sure who originally discovered this trick.)
To do this, you’ll need to place a table somewhere on your island, and then place as many DIY recipes on top of it as possible. From there, stand right next to the table, open up the Island Designer app on your NookPhone, and select “Request cleanup.”
Once you order a cleanup, the table and the DIY recipes will automatically be sent to the Recycle Box in the Resident Services building. You can then collect your table from the recycle box to repeat this process as many times as you need. You can see this full process in action in our gameplay video below.
There are a few more things to keep in mind when it comes to using this trick:
First, according to Instagram user 8bitbish, the Recycle Box can only hold 80 items in total. You’ll see 60 of them when you open the recycle box, and the other 20 are “hidden” until there’s room to display them.
Next, according to users on Reddit and Instagram, this trick will also work for storing turnips.
You can use more than one table at a time, and stand between them, if you want to speed up this process.
Finally, make sure you’re not standing next to a tree when you request the cleanup. The tree will be wiped out, but it won’t be transferred to the recycle box, so you’ll have to plant a new tree or move another tree to replace it.
While this may not be the best solution for storing extra DIY recipes (it would be better if we could simply store them at home), it seems to be the best solution we have right now.
To learn more about Animal Crossing: New Horizons, or to view the rest of our guides for the game, check out our previous coverage.
Disclosure: Nintendo gave SuperParent a code for Animal Crossing: New Horizons for coverage purposes.
Brandy Berthelson has been writing about video games and technology since 2006, with her work appearing on sites including AOL Games, Digital Spy, and Adweek. When she’s not gaming, Brandy enjoys crafting, baking, and traveling with her husband.
