Hi! Could I ask for some help understanding something? It would be much appreciated. Since ACNH has come out I have seen interest split between 3 seperate currencies; fish bait, bells and NMTs. I understand the bells and the NMTs a little. Could someone please explained why Nook Mile Tickets are considered so valuable and why people also want fish bait so much when manila clams are so plentiful? Again I apologize for the inconvenience and I am sorry if I appear dense. I just want to understand the value behind these things so I can best use them...

part of the reason they're so valuable is that you can't really cheese NMTs and fish bait. you can get billions of bells easily in the stalk market and by time travelling, but NMTs and bait you have to actually put the time in to earn them.

NMTs are especially valuable because they can be used to hunt for villagers on the islands. Raymod is a super popular villager (arguably the MOST popular villager) and he doesn't have an amiibo, so you can't buy or make a fake amiibo to get him, you have to get him the regular way. considering there's just under 400 villagers in the game, your chances of finding him are approximately 0.26%, so people can go through hundreds of tickets hunting him down. the other new villagers without amiibo aren't unpopular either, so people go through a lot trying to find them too.

the combination of them being a more scarce resource and an item that gets used up quickly makes them a relatively stable form of currency compared to bells, which quickly inflate through the roof and become worthless

Thanks for the explanation chiyoko! I was wondering the same.

Thanks! Understood. This begs the question though; what would make a person want to use fish bait as a currency? I am not exactly getting better fish when I use it...

^

People are charging (and selling lol) fish bait for $7 on eBay regularly. I don't get it either. I have never had to use more than 100 to get a rare fish myself (I only use them when I am nearing the end of a month and haven't found something for the museum) and fishing isn't the best way to make bells in this game... so I have no idea. Maybe people still just like to pretend we're playing NL and fish for (decent fish lol) for hours or something?

yeah I'm not sure why people would want bait so bad. the only two scenarios I can think of are A) it's getting close to the end of the month and this person is missing a fish and doesn't time travel, or B) they're preparing for a golden rod speed run (but that kinda seems like cheating to get your bait in advance through trading )

Interesting. It has so little value in game (relatively speaking), yet we as a community have made it into a relatively valuable item. Like people trading beads centuries ago lol.

People have found a way to dupe NMTs and FB and anything else that can be mailed. It should be...interesting to see what the market looks like now.

OT: Nintendo...just give us cloud saves already...

Lol it took this thread for me to figure out what NMT was... also ew that people are all creating a treasure out of a common item to have the hipster cat. Y'all make fun of people who actually have his style irl, but oh cause its AC and he has 2 color eyes. You'd let it fly if it were anime too lol
But nonetheless interesting thread that did answer a couple questions I wasn't understanding. I've practically used no bait and I found all the rare fish that have been in season naturally. Even the Coelacanth was easier than ever, I've already caught 3. When I use bait I don't seem to get more expensive fish any faster except for the fact I don't have to walk around as much. It more seems like it's just cycling the RNG from where ever you're fishing rather than helping me get the good fish, in fact it only seemed mildly worth it at the dock when the tuna & marlin were appearing.

I sometimes sell stuff for fish bait, and there's quite a few good reasons why bait is valuable, to me at least.

- As Chiyoko said, collecting fish bait takes work. Its also extremely tedious, as you have to slowly walk around your beach waiting for those little shadows to pop up. Each manila clam takes up 1 inventory slot, and degrades 1 use of your shovel, so there are constant breaks in the gameplay loop where you need to then individually craft each bait, and additionally buy or forge new shovels. You only have so much time a day to play the game, why waste it all on something which is just not fun?

- A lot of the rarer fish only spawn in small, fixed areas, where it is hard to cycle new fish. Any fish belonging to a pond, clifftop river, river mouth, or pier can be hard to find because you're constantly having to deal with common fish popping up.

- If you're interested in making the models from C.J, that means you need to catch a minimum of 4 of every fish. 1 to the museum, and 3 to C.J. If you just try and wait for these rarer, hard-to-spawn fish to appear naturally, it can take a very long time to get what you need.

At the end of the day it just comes down to my impatience, but I'm just not down with the idea of having to slowly wait for weeks or even months on end for the fish I've been looking for to pop up.