What to Expect in the Animal Crossing New Horizons Update?
The Animal Crossing 3.0 update actually released on the 14th. Yes, it came a day early. Peacefully minding my own business when suddenly an update when I tried to play animal crossing – ta da the hotel update is here. After 4 years of silence and being told there would be no more updates for Animal Crossing New Horizons on the Nintendo Switch, the 3.0 update and Nintendo Switch 2 edition of the game was announced. With the new Hotel, run by Kapp’n’s family – New Leaf players may recognise them from the island where you could play games. Along with the addition of the hotel, we have the DIY request board, multi-crafting, and a few surprises like new controls for terraforming allowing you to make smaller movements.
Your Island’s New Hotel
Let’s start with the Hotel. Each day a new room will be ready for you to decorate for new hotel visitors, Lelani (Kapp’n’s wife) suggests themes for you to decorate the rooms. Using the decorating mechanics developed for homes and the Happy Home Paradise DLC you can decorate the hotel room, there are no required items like in HHP for an islander’s home but there is still the suggested category. Then your first guest arrives, I had Crackle the pig, also known as Spork, arrive and settled into his new seaside-themed hotel room. Your hotel tourists can then be found walking around your island for a day or so. From what I’ve seen online, the villager you have come to visit is mostly random unlike the Happy Home Paradise DLC where everyone starts with the same villager.
As you design more hotel rooms, you unlock more themes and more of the new themed furniture. The new furniture sets found so far are the Marble Set, the Artiful Set, the Hotel Set, the Tubular Set and the Kiddie Set. Collecting up those hotel tickets for the ranges of furniture is going to be an important side quest for many of us.
The DIY Donation Box can be found on the pier next to Kappn’s boat. Here you earn hotel tickets to buy the furniture items. Each Monday a new life up of DIY requests will appear on the board. When you finish one request another will fill its place. Plenty of opportunities to top off your island tickets. Also, the perfect opportunity to make use of the new multicrafting feature too.
Resetti is back!
In Animal Crossing New Horizons, Resetti will not be popping up outside your house (thankfully). Resetti and the new reset island feature. This feels like Nintendo were shocked to see everyone’s insane builds then people resetting their islands instead of tearing them down. I found Resetti walking around my island, I’m unsure if this was triggered by being in Island Designer. Resetti has done a lot of therapy and is a much calmer mole these days, happy to help and dealt with his anger issues regarding resets. You can cut his explanation short or ask for more detail of what he can help with. Either way, afterwards when you speak with Isabelle you can request his reset services.
As soon as I booted up the Island Designer App, tutorial bubbles appeared explaining the new controls mechanics. While holding down L you can now have better control over your movements, moving in cardinal directions only, allowing more precise movements. We’ve all knocked down the same block instead of adding one, right? Well these new precise movements should help us put an end to that. You can use these controls anytime, not only while in the Island Designer.
New Furniture Sets
The Animal Crossing New Horizons update also brought with it the Lego collaboration of furniture to Animal Crossing New Horizons. Go to Nook Shopping and under the promotions you can find all of the Lego themed items to be ordered, if there’s another colour you want, you can always take them to Reece and Cyrus on Harv’s Island. The Legend of Zelda and Splatoon furniture sets and new villagers are locked behind Amiibo and can’t be traded in boxes like other villagers. Almost all Amiibo from these franchises can be used to unlock the items and villagers.
I found something else interesting in the Nook Shopping app, under all of the Lego furniture, you can find the special items from Pocket Camp. Previously these have only been attainable by linking your AC Pocket Camp app to your Switch. But with the app now being purchase only, it seems the Animal Crossing team wanted us to still be able to get the Campsite sign, Cookie Cart and the OK Motors decorations.
The Future of the Animal Crossing Franchise
It’s great to see Animal Crossing get more love and support from Nintendo. They promised years of updates, then 2 years after release, they announced that 2.0 and the paid DLC would be the final update coming. Plot twist! Four years later we’ve been treated to more animal crossing content. This does unfortunately suggest that we won’t be getting another new animal crossing for a while yet. But Animal Crossing New Leaf got an Amiibo update years after the game came out. Maybe this is to tide us over for a year or two more while they work on what follows New Horizons.
