Animal Crossing: New Horizons Is Getting A Bigger Update Than Anyone Expected To Start Next Year
We’re back on island time.
Back in 2020, Animal Crossing: New Horizons launched on Nintendo Switch at the perfect time to offer a little relief to everyone stuck inside during lockdowns. Now, a Nintendo Switch 2 edition and a massive update for all players are on the way just in time to distract us all from real-life horrors once again.
Arriving on January 15, 2026, the Switch 2 Edition improves New Horizons’ resolution and adds a few features to take advantage of the new console’s hardware, while the game’s 3.0 version update brings a much larger batch of new activities to the game. On Switch 2, the biggest addition will be making New Horizons compatible with mouse mode. Using the system’s new Joy-Cons, you can flip to mouse mode to place and move decorations in your house — a simple but huge improvement to how it’s done now. A trailer for the update shows mouse mode being used to select and move nearly an entire house’s worth of decorations at once, which should make it much easier for players to channel their inner Martha Stewart. Mouse mode can also be used to design new clothing patterns and draw on the community bulletin board.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ massive new update adds new ways to customize and decorate your island.
The Switch 2 Edition also increases the online player count to 12, and incorporates both voice chat with the console’s microphone and video chat for those with an optional camera. Finally, the new edition adds an in-game megaphone that also works with the onboard microphone. Using the megaphone, you can call out the name of villagers on your island and they’ll respond, letting you know where you can find them.
Much bigger changes are coming with a free update launching the same day, regardless of which console you’re playing on. Kapp’n, who was previously relegated to giving boat tours, plays a big role in the update, as his entire family is now on the island to run a hotel, using the player as cheap labor. Your job is to decorate the hotel’s rooms, each of which has a specific theme (the trailer shows off a seaside-themed room, for instance). Every room will have a selection of furniture based on that theme you can use, and you can pull items out of your own collection to help. Meeting teh brief in your decorations will earn you hotel tickets, which can be used to purchase new decorations and other prizes.
The hotel also features a set of mannequins for you to dress, and guests who come to the island to stay can choose to wear the outfit you picked out. Along with NPC guests, friends who join your island through online play will also be able to wear the clothes you display in the hotel.
New Horizons’ hotel adds even more spaces to decorate, with themed rooms to guide your creations.
Slumber Island is yet another customization-based addition coming in the update. A new option is added when your character tucks into bed, which lets you visit a new island in your dreams, with much more freedom to reshape the terrain, either alone or with other players you invite online.
Most of what’s coming in the update feels like an expansion of what New Horizons already offers, with more ways to decorate and customize your island. But a much more unexpected addition is a host of Nintendo collaborations. A set of new game consoles you can place in your home let you actually play games from those systems. A host of new items from The Legend of Zelda and Splatoon are also being added, along with villagers based on some of their characters.
Compared to previous Animal Crossing games, New Horizons is much more focused on giving players freedom to reshape their town in whatever way they want, making it feel more like a sandbox than a simulation of small-town life like the earlier games in the series. The next update is almost entirely built around that idea, giving players more ways to micromanage their island. That may be a little disappointing for anyone who misses how weird (and sometimes mean) older Animal Crossing villagers could be, but if you’re looking for a way to build a more pleasant world to spend some time in come January, Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ version 3.0 update looks perfect.
