Animal Crossing: New Horizons — How to spawn and catch infinite tarantulas

Your first thought when you hear the phrase "infinite tarantulas" might be to get out your matches so you can just set your house on fire and move across the country. In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, their existence is actually a blessing in disguise.

Tarantulas are one of the most difficult bugs to catch in the game since they're quick and one bite can cause you to faint. However, because of their difficulty, they can be sold for a lot of money at shops. You can take advantage of this even further by finding an island with your Nook Miles Ticket that spawns infinite tarantulas, which you can use to fund your island and pay back Tom Nook. Here's how to turn these walking nightmares into money-making machines.

How to catch infinite tarantulas

1. Buy a Nook Miles Ticket at Resident Services.
2. Make sure you have your net in your inventory.
3. When it's nighttime, go to Dodo Airlines and redeem your ticket for a Mystery Island Tour.

The game now has the chance to spawn an island with tarantulas on it. You'll know you've found the right one if you see at least three skittering about. If you catch one, more will respawn, so you can just keep catching tarantulas until you're done.

Not every island will have what you need here, but you can keep buying Nook Miles Tickets until you get the right one.

Tips for catching tarantulas

As we've mentioned, tarantulas are one of, if not the, toughest bugs to catch in Animal Crossing. They move quickly, and one bite will cause you to faint. Luckily, it's doable to fill up your inventory with tarantulas even if you're not the most skilled bug catcher out there.

Here's how to catch a tarantula:

1. Equip your net.
2. Slowly approach the tarantula by holding down the A button while all of its legs are on the ground.
3. Immediately stop if it rises on its back legs and faces you. Otherwise, it'll pounce.
4. When it puts all legs back down on the ground, continue to slowly approach.
5. Repeat until you get close enough.
6. When it's within reach, quickly tap the A button to swing your net.

If you're having issues approaching a tarantula, try unequipping your net. The tarantulas will run away from you in most cases if you don't have it equipped. They'll still bite you if you get super close, though. They also won't revert to running away if you already approached them with a net. I found the best results when I got as close as I could without a net, then quickly switched to it and repeated the process above.

Another good tip: It's OK if you faint! You can faint as many times as is necessary. You'll just respawn in front of Wilbur, the pilot, who will repeat that you should be more careful.

Like many of the creatures in Animal Crossing, tarantulas are only available at certain times of the year. In the Northern Hemisphere, tarantulas appear from November through April between 7:00 pm and 4:00 am.

At the time of this writing, March is almost over. So if you want to get in on tarantula action, you'll want to get in some time over the next month.

How to reap the benefits of infinite tarantulas

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You can do a few things with your newfound tarantula collection. You can decorate your home or your island with all the tarantula tanks (just drop it from your inventory, and you'll place it on the ground in a tank). However, the reason you're likely subjecting yourself to a tarantula island is to sell them. You'll certainly want to because they are worth a lot of money.

As you can see from my example above, one tarantula is worth around 6,400 Bells. With my haul, I was able to earn 108,800 Bells. That's more than enough to pay off your first loan to Tom Nook and then some!

If you have the expanded inventory and only bring your net and one other item with you, for example, you could theoretically bring in an extra 70,400 Bells.

Spiders can be your best friend if you let them!