Nintendo releases big ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ update earlier than expected

Nintendo has released its last free major content update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons over a day earlier than planned. During its Direct presentation in October, the gaming giant announced that it’s rolling out New Horizons version 2.0 on November 5th. As TechCrunch and IGN have confirmed, though, the update is now live and can be downloaded to your Switch. Version 2.0 adds quite a number of new features to the game, including characters from old Animal Crossing titles. 

One of those characters is Brewster, the quiet pigeon proprietor who’ll open up the Roost café at the museum after you do a certain favor for museum director Blathers. Kapp’n, the singing sailor kappa, is also back and will take you to remote islands on his boat. You can only purchase boat rides once a day with Nook Miles, though, so you can’t endlessly sail around all day. If you want to shop from new stores owned by familiar characters, you can head over to Harv’s Island, which now has an open market. Reese & Cyrus’ shop, for instance, will offer new types of furniture customization, while Katrina will read your fortune.

The update adds gyroid hunting and cooking activities, as well. For the latter, which will be part of DIY recipes, you can combine anything you harvest and other ingredients to create new dishes. Finally, New Horizons 2.0 introduces several quality-of-life improvements, including the ability to establish ordinances. You can make the residents get up at the time of the day you’re active in the game, for example, or reduce weeds’ growing rate. The update also allows you to keep more items by giving you a bigger home storage and storage sheds you can place around your island. 

In addition to the free update, Nintendo announced last month that it’s releasing a Happy Home Paradise paid DLC that’ll let you design vacation homes for characters on November 5th. That one isn’t available yet, but it’ll set you back $25 when it comes out tomorrow.