Nintendo announced today that Animal Crossing: New Horizons will be receiving some massive updates, both in the form of a free expansion and the paid DLC Happy Home Paradise. While players can buy Happy Home Paradise as a standalone DLC, the package will also be a part of the premium Nintendo Switch Online subscription that’ll be available at the end of this month.
Included in the free expansion pack coming out next month are new buildings and mechanics that will breathe new life into Nintendo’s best-selling game, with some familiar faces from the franchise finally coming to the paradisiac island. For example, Brewster will open a Café on the island, where you can invite neighbors, visitors, and friends to hand out. Kapp’n will also offer a boat tour service that’ll allow players to explore the vast sea. There’s also a new shop that’ll come to Harv’s Island, where players usually go for photo shootings.
The free DLC also comes with cooking DIY recipes, expanded storage space, special gyroids that’ll show up buried as fossils, and quality of life tweaks that’ll help reduce weed growth on your island.
The free DLC package already gives players plenty of reasons to go back to your island, but the paid expansion Happy Home Paradise is set to be a real game-changer. That’s because the Happy Home Paradise DLC owners will become part of a vacation committee responsible for building houses and other buildings on other islands. Besides taking on missions that’ll allow players to design their own vacation homes, the paid DLC will also let you invite more animals to live on their island, make suggestions to reform and refurbish the homes of current inhabitants, and even create facilities such as schools and restaurants. With the Happy Home Paradise, players will no longer be limited to designing their own island. Instead, they’ll be able to build all over an archipelago, which is a pretty significant expansion.
Nintendo will sell the Happy Home Paradise DLC for a one-time fee of $24.99. However, with the new membership plan of Nintendo Switch Online, players will also be able to enjoy the content of Happy Home Paradise for as long as they remain subscribed. While the basic Nintendo Switch Online subscriptions cost $19.99 per year, the premium plan will cost $49.99 for the same period. In addition, the expanded subscription will give players access to Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis games. Also, the inclusion of Animal Crossing: New Horizons first paid DLC on the premium subscription might mean Nintendo intends to give members even more special advantages in the future.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available right now exclusively for the Nintendo Switch. Both the free and the paid expansion packages will be available on November 5. The Nintendo Switch Online premium subscription will be available on October 25. Check out some of the experiences players can enjoy with the Happy Home Paradise DLC below:
- 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!