Golden tools in Animal Crossing on GameCube

All four

In the same order as the table below: net, rod, shovel, axe.

The golden shovel is a tree

Somewhere in town, every day, there is a glowing spot in the ground. Dig it and the hole becomes a special one. Bury an ordinary shovel in that same hole, and what you have planted is a sapling. It grows into a gold tree, and shaking the gold tree drops the golden shovel.

So you do not buy a second shovel and bury it anywhere. The hole has to be the one the shining spot left behind, and the thing you get is fruit off a tree rather than a gift.

Two details worth having. Burying the shovel in that hole always works, with no chance of failure, unlike burying bells, which can fail and leave you an ordinary sapling. And the tree takes four days to grow, one stage per day, then drops exactly one golden shovel when shaken. After that it is an ordinary gold tree and will never drop another.

What each one actually does

• Golden axe: never breaks. It is the only tool in the game that cannot. An ordinary axe wears through eight stages and takes 72 clean tree hits to destroy, and hitting something that bounces it back costs three times as much as a tree does, so a careless player can break one in about 24 swings.
• Golden net: a genuinely bigger reach. The catch radius goes from 15 to 21, and the swing sweeps 60 instead of 50.
• Golden shovel: a 1 in 10 chance of 100 bells. Only on a dig that would otherwise turn up nothing, and only if you have moved since your last dig, so you cannot stand on one spot and farm it.
• Golden rod: fish notice it from a wider angle, and they nibble longer. The hardest fish to spook go from a 3 degree notice cone to 7.5, and the bite window on the rarest fish goes from 45 to 60.

You cannot sell them

All four are priced at zero. Nook buys at a quarter of an item's price, a quarter of zero is zero, and the shop has a separate branch for that case: he takes it off your hands and gives you nothing. There is no way to turn a golden tool back into money.

The golden axe, and Farley

Later games have you throw an axe into a fountain and meet a goddess. That is City Folk. There is no axe-throwing and no silver axe in the GameCube game.

Here, the town has to be at its top environment rating and stay perfect for fifteen days in a row, with no litter lying around. Then you talk to the wishing well and choose "How are things?". Farley comes up out of the well, gives you the axe, and that is the only time you ever see him.

Every one of these has to be true when you ask:

• The town is at the top environment rating.
• The fifteen-day perfect streak is intact.
• There is no litter on the ground.
• You do not already have the golden axe.
• You live here. A player visiting from another town cannot get it.
• You have a free pocket slot.
• You are not still working Nook's part-time job.

The catch nobody mentions: handing over the axe clears the town's perfect streak. In a house with four players, the second one has to build another fifteen days from scratch. The game's own comment on that line says only one player can get it at a time.

One more wrinkle, if you are counting days. The streak sits at zero on your first perfect day rather than one, so the award actually lands on the sixteenth perfect day, not the fifteenth.