Nook Mile Tickets were first introduced during Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the most recent installment of Nintendo's long-running, relaxing game series. Nook Miles are accrued by completing several small tasks around the island such as hitting rocks, selling clumps of weeds, and now getting cups of coffee and Brewster's cafe thanks to the 2.0 update. Nook Miles can then be used to purchase many items and upgrades from the Nook Stop like the hairstyles and Custom Design Pro Editor App, furniture that is otherwise unavailable to buy normally, and Nook Mile Tickets.

Earning Nook Mile Tickets is a lot easier when first starting a save file because completing tasks like donating fish and bugs to Blathers' museum rewards many miles, and filling out this checklist means dwindling down the number of completable quests that pay Nook Miles. Then, players are left with their daily Nook Miles+ quests to gain Nook Miles needed to purchase more furniture and tickets. But because of their uses and their rarity over bells, which can be easily earned by selling turnips, Nook Mile Tickets have become an equal form of currency between player trades.

RELATED: Where the Next Animal Crossing Game Should Take the Series

The Value of Nook Mile Tickets

Shino on bridge in snow.

Nook Mile Tickets are an important commodity used to collect resources and hunt for specific villagers at faraway islands. The value of Nook Mile Tickets stems from the craze over certain villagers or the desire to find a precise one that players hope to add to their island. Rather than letting the game takes its course and waiting to see who arrives at a campsite and who they happen upon via the mystery tours, players can go looking for a specific one, spending ticket after ticket until they do so.

Having many Nook Mile Tickets on-hand also means that players can collect resources like wood, stone, and clay more quickly, and be able to craft items more readily. In this way, it becomes similar to premium currency, such as in mobile games where players would normally have to pay with real money to obtain. Rather than waiting until they've accrued enough Nook Miles to head out on mystery tours, they can use Nook Mile Tickets to speed up the process. Combined with time-traveling, it thereby vanquishes the original nature of Animal Crossing, where players were meant to only play the game for a little bit each day.

The hype around some villagers has reached such peaks, because of the internet, that players are willing to spend several million bells to snatch them from other folks' islands if not spend dozens of Nook Mile Tickets to find them, or sometimes both. Nookazon—the online marketplace that allows players to buy, sell, trade, and auction Animal Crossing items, NPCs, and DIY recipes—lists the popular Raymond as worth about 5 million bells or 200 NMT (that's 400,000 Nook Miles). Shino, a deer villager that's been all the rage since New Horizons' 2.0 release, can sell for an insane 40 million bells or 400 NMT. Because when fans have been playing since March 2020 and participating in the Stalk Market week after week, the Nook Miles and bells are easy to come by. But when the bells are so readily available, their value has decreased.

Why Nook Mile Tickets Are More Valuable Than Bells

acnh froggy chair

Bells have always been the main form of currency in the world of Animal Crossing, but the use of online connectivity since New Leaf has largely decreased the value of bells because they're easily obtainable. This was even further exasperated when, during the first peak of Covid-19 quarantine, the website turnip.exchange alongside many Discord and Reddit communities popped up, streamlining the process completely. Now, players can sift through a long list of New Horizons islands and decide to either wait in line for hours to sell their hundreds if not thousands of turnips for a hefty 500 or more bells per, or a more modest but still profitable 200 to 300 bells per more quickly. With players able to earn millions in a single week with no economical blowback due to the fictional nature of the game, bells are no longer as valuable as they were back in the GameCube Animal Crossing days, when paying off house loans took months, at the least.

Enter: the Nook Mile Ticket, something most players originally wanted for villager-hunting or resource-collecting but is now being used as a major form of currency on Nookazon and for trading. Why would someone selling Raymond want a few million bells, something they already have and can get more of quite easily, when Nook Mile Tickets have a more practical use, if not using them to purchase more furniture items and DIY recipes—things that can only be collected by chance in the game.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is out now for Nintendo Switch.

MORE: Animal Crossing: New Horizons' November 2021 Update Makes Nook Miles More Valuable