While Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a huge hit at the beginning of the pandemic and continued to grow with all the updates, fans had been wondering if Nintendo was done with the game. Today, with their Animal Crossing Direct, Nintendo answered that question with a resounding “not yet!” November 5, 2021, will bring a 2.0 update to the game and some paid DLC, but as they stated in the presentation, “this will be last major free content update” to the game.
Below is a quick run-down of all that was announced in the Direct. And if you missed it or want to watch it again, check out the full presentation (in 2 parts) at the bottom of this post.
- Brewster Will Open a Café: Something new is coming to a corner of the museum. The quiet proprietor Brewster will open the Roost after you fulfill a certain favor for museum director Blathers. The Roost is a new location to take a relaxing break in and enjoy some hand-selected coffee. You may run into some island residents here, too. If you use the amiibo phone inside the café, you can invite other characters to join you by using compatible amiibo cards. If you’d like, you can even invite friends to your island and bring them to the Roost to enjoy relaxing cups of joe together.
- Take a Boat Tour With Kapp’n: Kapp’n hangs out at the pier and will take you to one of the remote islands on his boat. The sea shanty he serenades you with along the way is also part of the fun! You may arrive at islands with mysterious flora that’s never been seen before, or islands with different seasons and times of day. What kind of mysteries await?
- Unearth Gyroids: So far, fossils could be dug up from the ground, and now you can also find gyroids. Each gyroid plays unique sounds. You can even customize them to match their surroundings when you place them!
- Shop at the Open Market on Harv’s Island: Harv’s Island is undergoing a renewal. With a little help from his friend Harriet, Harvey is inviting some shops to the island for an open market. Contribute Bells to the cause to help make it happen! Familiar visitors on your island like Redd, Saharah and Kicks will have shops here now, and Reese & Cyrus’s shop will offer furniture customization that can’t be done through DIY workbenches. At Katrina’s shop, she’ll look at your fortune of the day. Harriet can even teach you some different hairstyles!
- Get Cooking: Cooking will be added to DIY recipes. After growing vegetables in your garden like tomatoes, wheat, sugarcane, potatoes and carrots, you can combine your harvest or other ingredients and fill up your dining table with delicious looking dishes. Enjoy while it’s hot!
- Further Support to Your Island Life: Nook, Inc. will offer further support for your island life. From group stretching at the plaza and bigger home storage, to the Resident Representative being able to establish ordinances like reducing the rate at which weeds grow or making all the residents get up early in the morning, there are more options to help you enjoy and adjust the island to fit your lifestyle.
On top of all of these updates, you will also have the ability to store 5,000 items in your home storage, participate in Group Stretching at the town square, enable ordinances on your island (like requiring all residents to wake up early), and more.
If all this was not enough for you, though, there will also be a paid DLC update coming on November 5. Happy Home Paradise is essentially Happy Home Designer 2.0, and will be incorporated into the game as a work option for those who buy the $24.99 US expansion. Choose “Go to work” at the airport to head off to your job as a part of the Paradise Planning Team.
- Work With Lottie as a Member of the Paradise Planning Team: Clients with different dream vacation requests will visit a new resort area located in an archipelago, made up of several different islands, where the Paradise Planning team is located. You can talk to a client and find out the details of their requests for a vacation home, and then make their dreams happen!
- Design Dream Vacation Homes: After choosing a location for your client’s dream vacation home, you can design the interior where you’ll place designated furniture that was delivered ahead of time. As you continue designing vacation homes, you’ll acquire various design techniques, from changing how the home is structured by adding partition walls and pillars to divide the space, to adding counters, ambient lighting and soundscapes to add depth to the room design, and more. The vacation home themes vary depending on the client, and many requests await your expertise. You can also decorate the exterior yard.
- Make Remodeling and Roommate Recommendations: As you gain experience as a designer, more furniture will become available, and you’ll also be able to make more suggestions. These include recommendations like remodeling the vacation homes of clients you’ve helped previously with different furniture, or even recommending that two clients share a room together as roommates.
- Design Facilities: There are several vacant buildings on the island where Lottie’s Paradise Planning team is located. Lottie wants to make this island more robust and developed, so you’ll be able to help design facilities such as a school, restaurant and café.
- Get Inspiration From the Happy Home Network: Capture photos of the vacation homes you design and save them to your catalog, which you can check out through the in-game Happy Home Network app in your NookPhone. From this app, you can also access the Showroom to view the building examples of designers from all over the world who have posted their creations online. You can follow the designers you like and view their samples for inspiration.
- Use amiibo To Invite More Clients: Usually your job is to look for clients on the resort who may be considering having their own vacation home, but … if you use the current Animal Crossing series amiibo accessories, you can invite a specific client to discuss their vacation home. With amiibo, you can even design the vacation homes of busy individuals like Isabelle and Timmy & Tommy!
- Bring Your Techniques Back to the Main Island: Techniques you’ve obtained through your work on the Paradise Planning team can also be used on your home island. Perhaps this will be a great opportunity for you to overhaul the design of your own home. And if you give island residents souvenir chocolate from Paradise Planning as a gift, they may become interested in what the archipelagos and vacation homes have to offer. Then, one day when you become a veteran designer with lots of experience, you will eventually be able to remodel residents’ homes on your island by making suggestions to them, too!
Again, the paid Happy Home Paradise expansion will cost $24.99 US, but during the presentation, Nintendo stated that it will also be included in the Nintendo Online Expansion Pack, which means you will get this expansion for free if you are a Expansion Pack member.
What did you think of this Animal Crossing Direct and all the updates coming to New Horizons? Let us know in the comments. And if you missed the presentation or want to watch it again, check out the videos below.
[Source: Nintendo of America — Listed details about update copied directly from their press release]
[Update: The original version of this article stated we were not yet sure how the inclusion of Happy Home Paradise would work with the NSO + Expansion Pack.]
Steve is the Senior Editor of NintendoFuse and co-host of the NintendoFuse Podcast. He’s been a Nintendo gamer since age 6 and has been on staff with NintendoFuse since 2008.