Animal Crossing New Horizons: How to Catch a Golden Trout

The Golden Trout is a rather fancy-looking fish that spawns in the rivers around your island in Animal Crossing New Horizons. It's only available for a brief window each year, and will take a lot of fish bait and patience to catch. To help you get ahold of a Golden Trout, and to make the process as painless as possible, we've put together this guide. We'll give you tips on when and where to find them, as well as some info on sell price and availability.

On this page:

• How to Catch a Golden Trout in Animal Crossing New Horizons
• Golden Trout Shadow Size
• Golden Trout Sell Price

How to Catch a Golden Trout in Animal Crossing New Horizons

To catch a Golden Trout in Animal Crossing make sure to stock up on fish bait and fishing rods, then follow these steps:

1. Head to any of your clifftop rivers (any river above ground level)
2. Make sure the time is between 4pm and 9am.
3. In the Northern Hemisphere it will need to be March-May, Sept-Nov.
4. Throw bait into the water until a medium shadow size appears.
5. Wait for the fish to bite and reel it in.
6. Repeat until you catch a Golden Trout.

Golden Trout Shadow Size

The shadow size for a Golden Trout is the medium size. This means you should cast your line towards any shadow larger than the tiny and small sizes, but smaller than the large ones. We've included an image below that shows one of the medium shadow sizes.

We've been busy plugging away on a bunch more Animal Crossing New Horizons guides. You can find close to 100 guides right here on USG, and if you head to our AC: New Horizons Walkthrough you'll see them all in one handy place. From guides on the different kinds of buildings, to detailed breakdowns of how to catch specific bugs and fish, we've got you covered.

Golden Trout Sell Price

You can sell the Golden Trout to Timmy and Tommy for 15,000 Bells, making it one of the most valuable fish in the game. Alternatively, you could donate it to Blathers (more on donating fish and bugs here). If you want to make even more Bells per fish, consider storing the Golden Trout until CJ is around, as he'll buy each one for 22, 500. You can learn more about CJ and his 'seasports' challenges here.

Now that you've bagged yourself a Golden Trout be sure to check out some more of the Animal Crossing content we have on USG. First up, check out Caty's review of the game. After that we recommend reading this feature on the Hong Kong protests that are being carried out in the game.