Animal Crossing New Horizons: How to Get Pitfall Seeds

One of the more unique items in Animal Crossing New Horizons is the pitfall seed, which allows you to craft traps for both visitors and islanders. We'll show you how to get pitfall seeds and craft your own traps below.

On this page:

• How to Get Pitfall Seeds in Animal Crossing New Horizons
• How to Craft Pitfall Seeds
• How to Use Pitfall Seeds

How to Get Pitfall Seeds in Animal Crossing New Horizons

You can get pitfall Seeds in Animal Crossing New Horizons by digging up an existing pitfall seed trap, which will give you the DIY recipe for crafting more seeds in the future. You can find buried seeds either by inviting other players to your island and allowing them to place pitfall traps, or by visiting their island and having them point out where they are. Use your shovel to dig up the marked section of dirt, and you'll get the seed itself, as well as the recipe on how to craft more.

If you don't have any online friends who have the recipe themselves, you can also get the recipe for pitfall seeds as a random gift from villagers or the contents of balloons gifts (which you can find out how to bring down here). We don't recommend this method though, as there's no way to increase the chance of a pitfall seed recipe being inside.

How to Craft Pitfall Seeds

You can craft pitfall seeds with the following ingredients:

1. Clump of weeds (4)
2. Tree branches (6)

Weeds can be found growing on any island, but if you're not sure how to get tree branches quickly, we've outlined a guide on how to do that here. Once you have the ingredients, you can assemble a pitfall seed at any DIY workbench.

How to Use Pitfall Seeds

To use a pitfall seed to set a trap, follow these steps:

1. Use your shovel to dig a hole at the place you want to set the trap.
2. Go into your inventory and select the pitfall seed.
3. Choose to bury it in the hole.
4. Your character will put the seed in the hole you dug and fill it in. This will leave a mark on the ground as though there were a fossil or other object buried there.
5. The first player or villager to walk over the marked ground will fall into a hole and be briefly stuck until they wiggle the left Joy Con analog stick back and forth (NPC villagers will free themselves automatically after a short amount of time).
6. You can fall into your own traps, so be careful.

Pitfall seeds are destroyed when somebody triggers the trap and falls in. However, you can take it back out of the ground without triggering it by stepping close and digging it up with your shovel.

Fallen for our Animal Crossing content yet? You'll definitely enjoy Nadia's thoughts on how New Horizons emanates flip phone nostalgia, or check out Caty's arguments against time travelling here.