Everything We Learnt From The Animal Crossing Direct

Nintendo Dropped the Latest direct about Animal Crossing New Horizons featuring the final new update, paid DLC, and more Nintendo Online.

With the cafe, gyroids cooking and Kappn’s beautiful singing voice, after months of waiting, fans will once again have a reason to return to their island and hang out with their animal neighbors.

Here’s a link if you want to check out the full direct:

The New Update

The Animal Crossing direct first brought the announcement of a new update that will be out on November 5th. This will sadly be the last free update but thankfully it brings a lot of new attractions for your islanders to interact with.

• Brewster Will Open a Café: Something new is coming to a corner of the museum. The quiet proprietor Brewster will open the Roost after you fulfill a certain favor for museum director Blathers. The Roost is a new location to take a relaxing break in and enjoy some hand-selected coffee. You may run into some island residents here, too. If you use the amiibo phone inside the café, you can invite other characters to join you by using compatible amiibo cards. If you’d like, you can even invite friends*** to your island and bring them to the Roost to enjoy relaxing cups of joe together.

• Take a Boat Tour With Kapp’n: Kapp’n hangs out at the pier and will take you to one of the remote islands on his boat. The sea shanty he serenades you with along the way is also part of the fun! You may arrive at islands with mysterious flora that’s never been seen before or islands with different seasons and times of the day. What kind of mysteries await?

• Unearth Gyroids: So far, fossils could be dug up from the ground, and now you can also find gyroids. Each gyroid plays unique sounds. You can even customize them to match their surroundings when you place them!

• Shop at the Open Market on Harv’s Island: Harv’s Island is undergoing a renewal. With a little help from his friend Harriet, Harvey is inviting some shops to the island for an open market. Contribute Bells to the cause to help make it happen! Familiar visitors on your island like Redd, Saharah, and Kicks will have shops here now, and Reese & Cyrus’s shop will offer furniture customization that can’t be done through DIY workbenches. At Katrina’s shop, she’ll look at your fortune of the day. Harriet can even teach you some different hairstyles!

• Get Cooking: Cooking will be added to DIY recipes. After growing vegetables in your garden like tomatoes, wheat, sugarcane, potatoes, and carrots, you can combine your harvest or other ingredients and fill up your dining table with delicious-looking dishes. Enjoy while it’s hot!

• Further Support to Your Island Life: Nook, Inc. will offer further support for your island life. From group stretching at the plaza and bigger home storage to the Resident Representative being able to establish ordinances like reducing the rate at which weeds grow or making all the residents get up early in the morning, there are more options to help you enjoy and adjust the island to fit your lifestyle.

Happy Home Paradise Paid DLC

The Animal Crossing Direct also announced brand new paid DLC content in the form of the Happy Home Paradise. Here you join the Paradise Planning Team to design the perfect vacation homes for your Animal Friends. This is basically a Switch version of the 3DS game Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer and as an expansion for the main game, it sounds like a meaty piece of content.

This will also be releasing on November 5th for $24.99 however you can get it for free with the purchase of the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion pack which also includes N64 and Sega Genesis games for $49.99 or $79.99.

• Work With Lottie as a Member of the Paradise Planning Team: Clients with different dream vacation requests will visit a new resort area located in an archipelago, made up of several different islands, where the Paradise Planning team is located. You can talk to a client and find out the details of their requests for a vacation home, and then make their dreams happen!

• Design Dream Vacation Homes: After choosing a location for your client’s dream vacation home, you can design the interior where you’ll place designated furniture that was delivered ahead of time. As you continue designing vacation homes, you’ll acquire various design techniques, from changing how the home is structured by adding partition walls and pillars to divide the space, to adding counters, ambient lighting and soundscapes to add depth to the room design, and more. The vacation home themes vary depending on the client, and many requests await your expertise. You can also decorate the exterior yard.

• Make Remodeling and Roommate Recommendations: As you gain experience as a designer, more furniture will become available, and you’ll also be able to make more suggestions. These include recommendations like remodeling the vacation homes of clients you’ve helped previously with different furniture, or even recommending that two clients share a room together as roommates.

• Design Facilities: There are several vacant buildings on the island where Lottie’s Paradise Planning team is located. Lottie wants to make this island more robust and developed, so you’ll be able to help design facilities such as a school, restaurant and café.

• Get Inspiration From the Happy Home Network: Capture photos of the vacation homes you design and save them to your catalog, which you can check out through the in-game Happy Home Network app in your NookPhone. From this app, you can also access the Showroom to view the building examples of designers from all over the world who have posted their creations online.**** You can follow the designers you like and view their samples for inspiration.

• Use amiibo To Invite More Clients: Usually your job is to look for clients on the resort who may be considering having their own vacation home, but … if you use the current Animal Crossing series amiibo accessories, you can invite a specific client to discuss their vacation home. With amiibo, you can even design the vacation homes of busy individuals like Isabelle and Timmy & Tommy!

• Bring Your Techniques Back to the Main Island: Techniques you’ve obtained through your work on the Paradise Planning team can also be used on your home island. Perhaps this will be a great opportunity for you to overhaul the design of your own home. And if you give island residents souvenir chocolate from Paradise Planning as a gift, they may become interested in what the archipelagos and vacation homes have to offer. Then, one day when you become a veteran designer with lots of experience, you will eventually be able to remodel residents’ homes on your island by making suggestions to them, too!

Animal Crossing Amiibo Cards Series 5

There will also be a new series of Animal Crossing amiibo cards (and yes that includes Raymond) which will be available for purchase at select retailers. There will be six cards per pack. These will allow you to invite the villager on the card to your island and potentially get them to move in.

That was everything from the Animal Crossing Direct. Even with this being the last free update, there still seems to be plenty to enjoy in Animal Crossing, and it’s certainly great to see so many fan-favorite characters returning for another visit.

Animal Crossing New Horizons is available for Nintendo Switch

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Nintendo

Release Date: 2020-03-20

Nintendo Switch

Nook Inc. invites you to create your personal island paradise on a deserted island brimming with possibility.

Escape to your island getaway—however, whenever, and wherever you want