Animal Crossing has always been anti-instant gratification. By design, you have to take your time, wait for days to pass in real time, and complete a seemingly endless list of chores to build a meaningful life with your animal friends. The slowness is part of its appeal. But with New Horizons, some of that slowness became tedious: crafting its many items one at a time, painstakingly building cliffs and rivers by hand, picking up and placing objects one by one.
As I gathered when I previewed it last month, the newly released, free 3.0 update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons addresses those issues with quality-of-life fixes that still fit the spirit of Animal Crossing. It’s a small update in terms of content — there’s just enough here to give you a reason to revisit the game if you’ve been looking for one, and not much more than that — but major in reducing friction where there wasn’t meant to be any.
Separately, there’s also the new Switch 2 Edition, which noticeably improves New Horizons’ performance and ups its resolution. Otherwise, it doesn’t add anything that important — but for $4.99, it doesn’t really have to.
Nintendo Switch 2 Edition
The main appeal of the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition is the performance upgrade. On the original Switch, New Horizons would start to struggle as you placed more and more decorations around your island, sometimes to the point of severe frame rate drops. It meant that building out your island could also make it progressively less playable. My island is a pretty bare construction zone, so when I downloaded the Switch 2 upgrade, I visited several highly decorated Dream Addresses to test it out.
Anecdotally, I can say that there’s a significant improvement in how New Horizons runs, at least to my eye. All the Dream Addresses I visited were so busy with decor, from thickets of trees to loads of furniture covered in custom designs, that there were completely inaccessible areas — and I didn’t see any significant lag or choppiness like I’d expect on the original Switch version. It’s a boon for maximalist decorators, especially those of us who still want our islands to be functional amid chaotic and cluttered builds.
For me, that alone is worth the $5 upgrade. (If you don’t own the game already, the Switch 2 version is $65 to the original Switch’s $60.) Otherwise, the Switch 2 Edition doesn’t add anything you need to have. Nintendo did show a side-by-side comparison of the game’s improved resolution in the trailer for the upgrade, but I didn’t really notice the difference (with the caveat that simple visual fidelity is not particularly important to me in most games). The new megaphone, which lets you use the Switch 2’s microphone to call the names of villagers and locate them, didn’t work well for me; I saw Fuchsia, walked a short distance away so she was out of frame, and called her name, but got no reply.
Image: Nintendo
And then there are the Joy-Con mouse controls, which are available when decorating interiors, creating custom designs, and writing messages on the bulletin board. I’m sure there’s someone out there who will find the mouse controls useful or intuitive, but I am not that person. First of all, I originally played this game on a tiny Switch Lite screen and I’m really enjoying this new world of playing it on a TV, so forgoing my Pro Controller to slide the right Joy-Con around on my couch cushions is not a compelling proposition. But I also found that the sensitivity of the mouse controls actually made it harder for me to be precise about item placement.
The free 3.0 update, which is available on both the Switch and the Switch 2, feels like the bigger upgrade on the merits of the quality-of-life tweaks alone. I wrote last month that this update might actually get me to finish decorating my island, and I’ve already spent hours doing exactly that.
The most impactful change is one so minor, it wasn’t even called out in the update’s announcement trailer: you can strafe.
Before, when you were decorating or terraforming or even gardening, you’d have to constantly reorient yourself. If you were building a cliff while facing north, for example, you’d have to build one block of the cliff, move a little bit to the right, then turn to face north again without accidentally walking too far north and missing your mark. I would usually do a little circle to position myself and make sure I was aiming the tool in the right place, and even then, I’d frequently be a little bit off and accidentally destroy the bit of cliffside I’d just built. It was so awkward and clunky that I cleared out my entire island in order to redesign it and then… stopped playing the game for four years.
Now, you can press L and your character will hop into place in the grid, and while holding L, you can move in any direction without changing the direction you’re facing. You still have to do all your terraforming by hand, but the process has been completely streamlined. Press L to line yourself up, build the cliff, move one space over to build the next piece. That’s it. I’ve used it to build and destroy cliffs and rivers, dig up rows of plants, lay down new paths, and even count how many spaces in the invisible grid I would need for a particular project. I’m actually having fun with construction now that the act of doing it isn’t a massive pain.
Resetti is now my best friend
On top of that, Resetti is here to help you clean up your island in what’s possibly the only process in this game that can be described as instantaneous. He can “reset” the entire island, just the beaches, or individual areas you walk to and designate for him, sending the furniture to your storage so long as you have room. (And you will have room, since there are two new storage upgrades to unlock with a new max of 9,000 items.) I used his services to instantly pick up and put away the dozens of copies of the “wheat field” furniture item I’d used to decorate a rural area of my island, which I’d wanted to change but didn’t have the willpower to do manually.
Plants can now be stored, which allowed me to finally dig up and put away a bunch of bushes that were in my way. And while Resetti doesn’t clean up trees, bushes, or planted crops, he does pick up and put away flowers (or he’ll throw them away if you ask), which in my case saved me from what would’ve been an hour or more of digging up and moving flowers around. Resetti is now my best friend.
The 3.0 update is a designer’s dream, really. And it’s mostly thanks to those small changes and additions; the new Slumber Island feature, with which you can create up to three separate islands in a dream world, is a sandbox for hardcore decorators to play around in without having to demolish their main islands after all this time.
Outside of that, the new content is mostly just an excuse to revisit the game, rather than anything as groundbreaking as, you know, strafing. The main addition is a hotel on the pier. It isn’t novel; you’re tasked with decorating some hotel rooms, it introduces a handful of new furniture and clothing items to collect, and the hotel itself attracts tourists to your island to provide a bit of variety. It feels like an extension of the 2021 Happy Home Paradise DLC, which I really enjoyed.
A few days ago, some of my islanders informed me it had been three years and 11 months since I’d spoken to them. At that time, I really didn’t think I’d be back. But with the hotel, 3.0 gave me just enough of an excuse to return to New Horizons, and the quality-of-life updates are giving me a reason to stay a while.
