Here's when you can play Animal Crossing 2.0 and Happy Home Paradise

Animal Crossing: New Horizons was expected to get its last major content update on November 5, offering free content for New Horizon veterans and paid Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack players a wealth of new features. Below, we outline the expected release time of the 2.0 update and the Happy Home Paradise DLC while recapping the major new additions arriving with each download. There’s a lot to discover on the horizon, so here’s what you need to know.

When is the Animal Crossing Happy Home Paradise and update 2.0 release time?

The update released early, on the evening of November 3. It should download to your Switch automatically, but, if it doesn’t, simply go to your home screen and press the + button on the icon for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Select Software update > Via Internet.

What’s included in the Animal Crossing 2.0 update?

While the Happy Home Paradise DLC and New Horizons 2.0 update are intrinsically linked, they both offer players entirely different things. Here’s what you’ll be able to get whether you decide to take the free route or pay the extra money for the DLC.

• Harv’s Island Shop: New NPCs can set up shop in a store around the back of Harv’s Island. We imagine each seller will supply players with different kinds of goods.
• Cooking: Craft recipes via an oven in your home using fruits, vegetables, and other edible items you’ve found in your travels.
• Farming: Tomatoes, wheat, and sugarcane join pumpkins as possible new additions to your farms.
• Kapp’n Islands: Let Kapp’n take you to new islands that feature entirely different biomes to the one on your home island. Heading here offers a chance to catch fish or bugs not native to the current season.
• The Roost: Inside the Museum you can now spend some time with Brewster. You’ll see visiting villagers here and can invite your resident villagers here for a chat as well.
• Gyroids: The weird living furniture returns, and it can be dug up from the ground like fossils. This time, though, you can replant a dug up Gyroad to help them grow into Big Gyroids.
• Storage Shed: Store things outside your house!
• Permanent Ladders: Reach high up places without having to take out your ladder item every single time.
• Personal ABD: Access your money and make deposits anywhere you want.
• Ordinances: Set special conditions to help tune your island to how you play. Beautiful Island, for example, will stop weeds from growing and trees from dying. Early Bird and Night Owl will allow NPC shops to stay open earlier or later than the standard time.
• New Customizables: Furniture, fences, hairstyles, reactions, house exteriors, storage expansions, and KK songs are all getting new additions with this update.

What’s included in the Animal Crossing Happy Home Paradise DLC?

The general gist of the DLC is that your Villager will be able to visit a separate island and be tasked with designing vacation homes for others based on their specific requirements or themes. As a bonus, some of the items you make in your designs can be used on your home island too. After each job, you’ll be paid in Poki, which is spent on rare furniture at the Happy Home Shop.

• Facilities: Some of the themes will revolve around rooms suited for a specific purpose like a school, theater, or restaurant.
• Change weather, season, and time of day: Alter these elements to show off your vacation homes in their best light.
• Make rooms bigger or smaller: Use as much or as little space as you need to create your vision.
• Lights and sounds: You can change the lighting and sound of your vacation house to better set the mood.
• Remodel Villagers’ Homes: On your own island, you might also be given the chance to remodel the homes of your villagers using these new tools.

Can I preload the Happy Home Paradise DLC?

Yup! While the content itself hasn’t been unlocked, you can download Happy Home Paradise right now. Head to the eShop, and you’ll likely see an icon for the DLC in the “Featured” section of the store.

When you get to the page you’ll see two options. If you subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack you can download this content for free by tapping the large “download” button on the left-hand side of the screen. If you don’t subscribe to NSO Expansion Pack, then simply tap the “proceed to purchase” button as you would for any other eShop purchase.

Note that you can still buy Happy Home Paradise even if you have NSO because you’ll only be able to access the bulk of the DLC for as long as your Expansion Pack subscription remains active. Any acquired furniture will stay, but the main island will be off-limits until you re-subscribe. If you opt to pay upfront, you don’t have to worry about losing the DLC if you decide the included N64 and Genesis game catalogs aren’t good enough for you.

Regardless of how you get Happy Home Paradise, you should know that it requires about 600 MB of free space on your MicroSD Card.