Nintendo held its Animal Crossing New Horizons Direct today to announce all the new features coming to the Switch game this November, including a major free update and new paid DLC.
As far as free content goes, there’s plenty to get excited about next month.
For starters, the game will finally introduce Brewster, the resident barista in the museum’s Roost cafe. Not only can you head to the cafe to sip a coffee with Brewster, but you can also invite friends and other islanders to come and grab a drink with you.
Resident representatives (that’s you) can now enact island ordinances, which basically means you can choose when residents wake up to match your own sleep schedule, and attend group stretching sessions at the plaza. You can even use your Joy-Cons to join in with the stretching at home.
There are new home exterior options, so you can better match your home to your island’s design, and the home storage capacity has increased from 2400 to 5000 items, meaning you can store over twice the number of items.
There’s also a new storage shed you can place anywhere on your island to free up your pockets, and a new ABD to deposit and withdraw bells when you’re out and about.
At home, you can now use your Pro Decorating License to add lighting, ceiling decor and accent walls to different rooms, while the Pro Construction License will now allow you to build up to 10 bridges and inclines.
There are also nine new fence types, a new ladder setup kit which can be used to permanently place ladders around your island and you can now grow and customise gyroids for your home.
Players will be able to use DIY recipes to cook food using their own homegrown ingredients, including tomatoes, wheat, sugarcane, potatoes and carrots. Meanwhile, the Camera app in the NookPhone is getting a new eye-level handheld mode and a tripod mode.
As far as other islands go, Kapp’n Boat Tours now offer more islands to explore, while Harv’s island will be asking for contributions to build a plaza with shops.
Visitors to the new plaza will include Sahara and Kicks, as well as Reese and Cyrus who will customise furniture you can’t do alone, Katrina who will tell you your fortune and Harriet who will test newly-added hairstyles on you.
In total, 11 new hairstyles are getting added to the game, including the ones Harriet will teach you, along with 11 new reactions including waving goodbye, stretching and bouncing to music.
Islanders can now also invite you to their homes and even make surprise visits to yours.
All of the above will be included in the final major free update coming to Animal Crossing New Horizons on November 5.
Nintendo also surprised users by announcing a brand new paid DLC titled Animal Crossing Happy Home Paradise.
In Happy Home Paradise, you’ll assist resort developer Paradise Planning in designing dream vacation homes for characters based on their specifications.
You’ll select an island for the vacation home, position the furniture requested by the client, and then decorate the home to fit the character’s preferences.
You can change the size of a home’s interior and use partition walls, pillars and countertops to change the shape of the space. You can even adjust the lighting and add soundscapes to change the mood and polish the furniture to see animated effects.
Outside, you can place furniture, build fences, plant trees and create paths around the home, as well as modify the season, time of day and weather. You can also recommend roommates for characters and design schools, restaurants and hospitals for their islands.
Once you’re done designing, you can head back to the office to collect your pay check and purchase rare furniture to take back to your own island.
Once you’re back on your own island, you can use design techniques you learned while working in your own home and gift residents souvenirs to entice them into hiring you to build their dream vacation homes or even to remodel their homes on your own island.
There’s also the new Happy Home Network app, which lets you view and visit all of your past clients’ homes on your NookPhone and share your designs with other players online.
Happy Home Paradise will be available from November 5 for $24.99, with pre-orders open from October 29.
You might like…
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
