Club Benefits
Haven’t you heard? The Animal Crossing: New Horizons 3.0 update is here. One of the most popular Nintendo Switch games has just gotten a bunch of new content, and best of all, it’s free to those who already own the game — and available to both Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 players.
Last week, I checked out the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Nintendo Switch 2 Edition, a paid update that adds a few new features exclusively to Nintendo Switch 2 players. Now, it’s time to take a look at the good stuff in the free content update. There’s a new hotel, improved quality of life, Slumber Islands and more. I’m a big Animal Crossing fan myself, so I’m excited to share my thoughts on everything the 3.0 update entails.
Happy Hotel Paradise
After updating your game to the 3.0 version, you’ll see that a new hotel has been added to the island’s pier. All the rooms are empty — and surprise, that means it’s your job to paper the walls, choose the flooring and add furniture. Having more indoor spaces to decorate isn’t new to people who bought New Horizon's Happy Home Paradise DLC, which lets you create vacation homes for your animal friends. But I never got that DLC, so I was hyped to get started.
Each room in the hotel comes with a theme and recommended furniture to get you started. I sometimes struggle to get inspired when I’m left to my own devices, but give me a brief to stick to, and I’m away. I enjoyed the themes that were chosen for the hotel rooms; beach, modern and Japanese are three of the first options. The themes are flexible enough to give plenty of freedom, and prompted me to break my usual habits and properly consider the entire catalogue of furniture I had at my disposal.
As you complete rooms, you’ll unlock a special catalogue of hotel furniture that you can purchase to use in your own builds. You can get items from this catalogue by spending Hotel Tickets (your reward for decorating hotel rooms). The new furniture sets are pretty awesome, especially the Artful tatami-inspired items.
Island visitors
But a hotel isn’t complete without guests! When you have a room open, an animal from offshore will come and visit the island for a day. Guests are strictly on your island for a limited time only; they can’t be invited to stay permanently. Other than that, it feels similar to the campsite feature that has existed since the start of the game. But seeing fresh faces walking around every now and then is a nice novelty.
DIY request board
Another new addition to the pier is a request board. Kapp’n the boatsman will ask you for DIY furniture, which you can craft and put in the donation bin. You’ll be rewarded with Hotel Tickets for your efforts, which means more furniture from the new hotel catalogue for you.
The crafting request board is the smartest new idea from the 3.0 update, if you ask me. Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ game design is heavily built on crafting and decorating, and once you’ve made all the furniture you want for your island, the game can become a snorefest. So adding a new reason to craft DIY furniture reinvigorates the game as a whole.
Before now, I was drowning in every single kind of material, and had no reason to collect anything. Now, my materials are actually useful, and I have a reason to keep growing trees and harvesting stone and iron from my island’s rock garden. Once that’s done, I have a bunch of exciting new furniture to use in different ways in my houses and outdoor builds.
I’d love it even more if you got DIY recipes for new items rather than single items of furniture. It would tie things together — crafting DIYs to get DIYs — and you wouldn’t have to complete dozens of crafting requests to get enough Hotel Tickets for items you want multiples of.
Quality of digital life
Animal Crossing players will return to decorate the new hotel first and foremost, but the quality of life improvements will get them to stick around. The addition of bulk crafting and crafting using items in your storage is such a relief. There are some items you frequently need in large quantities, like fish bait, and it’s awesome to be able to craft these items ten times more efficiently than before.
I got on fine with Animal Crossing’s gameplay before bulk crafting, and I appreciate that the option has now been added. But I wish bulk actions had been taken a step further — you can buy up to 50 customization kits in a single transaction now, so why can’t you craft 50 fish bait in one go, rather than just ten?
There are lots more quality-of-life features included in the 3.0 update that feel wholly positive. The maximum number of items you can store has been expanded up to 9,000, and you can now store trees, shrubs and flowers you’re not using. Mr. Resetti can put away items for you, so you can quickly revert your island to a clean slate if you want to redecorate.
Even the controls have changed, as you can now hold L to move in any direction without turning your character around. This makes terraforming faster and so much easier than before — no more building cliffs in random places while your character is pointing the wrong way. In life simulation games, it’s the little things that count; all these upgrades make Animal Crossing: New Horizons so much more enjoyable that I almost feel like I’m playing a whole new game.
Islands of slumber
Everything from the Animal Crossing: New Horizons 3.0 update comes together with Slumber Islands. What better way is there to make use of all the new content than having entirely new islands to decorate in the dream world? You get access to every item you’ve collected before, in unlimited quantities. And you can also finally terraform the land and place furniture with your friends online.
Being able to decorate collaboratively is a shift of epic proportions — rather than just admiring your friends’ decor, you can now work together to create something beautiful. This update has already helped me form a ton more positive memories with my buddies, and I’m willing to bet this will apply to everybody who decorates an island with their friends. That saying goes whether you and your pals take the decorating seriously, or choose chaos and create an unhinged environment that even Crazy Redd would shake his head at.
Verdict
After getting the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Nintendo Switch 2 Edition upgrade pack, I felt that it was light on must-have features. But that just makes me feel even happier to have the free 3.0 update.
Nintendo could have put all the 3.0 update content into the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition and charged a fee for it, but instead, all Animal Crossing players have been given a bunch of new features to play with and quality of life improvements to make the game experience more enjoyable. It’s something that is worth celebrating, and I hope it will bring a lot of people back to their islands.
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