Features we want to see in Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ 3.0 update

Animal Crossing games have a tendency to make a resurgence long after their original release date. We first saw this with Animal Crossing: New Leaf in 2013 – it was received incredibly well on launch, but nonetheless received a huge major update in 2016 that added amiibo support, the campground, and all sorts of new items. Now, the same is happening with Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which had supposedly received its final content update in late 2021. Yet in 2026, it’s receiving a new 3.0 update that adds even more new content. This no doubt means the next new Animal Crossing is a few years off, and that this update is meant to hold us over for a while longer.

Knowing Nintendo, it’s entirely possible that the new features shown for the 3.0 update are the only ones we’ll be getting. That being said, the trailer never specifically mentioned that the 3.0 update would be the final content update for the game – not that that matters, given that they’ve broken such a promise before – but at the risk of being too ambitious, we’re listing some additional features that we want to see in future updates to New Horizons.

Returning villagers

Right now, four new villagers are confirmed for Animal Crossing’s 3.0 update. Mineru and Tulin have arrived from the Zelda series – Mineru is a deer with a snooty personality and Tulin is a bird with the jock personality. Then we have Cece and Viche, who are technically returning villagers, but this time they’re cosplaying Shiver and Frye instead of Callie and Marie. Cece has the peppy personality, whereas Viche has the normal personality. There are well over twenty villagers from previous Animal Crossing games, however, who do not appear in New Horizons. New Leaf had many of its own collaboration villagers, including Ganon, Wolf Link, Epona, and Medli, and they’re seemingly nowhere to be found in this update. Furthermore, there are several villagers from way farther back that haven’t appeared since the original Animal Crossing on GameCube or, in some cases, the original original Animal Crossing on the Nintendo 64 in Japan. For example, Bow and Meow are a dog and a cat, respectively, with digital-looking faces loosely based on handheld pet care simulators. They’d likely be popular if brought back to New Horizons. Other villagers, like Carrot (who is a female cow), would fit well in themed towns. These are all unlikely inclusions, though, and as much as we’d like to see new villager personalities added to the game, that’s more likely to happen in the next all-new Animal Crossing instead.

More quality-of-life improvements

At the time of writing, Animal Crossing’s 3.0 update introduces several quality-of-life improvements. The most notable one by far is bulk crafting, which finally lets you do things like craft multiple fish bait at once rather than having to go through the screen over and over again. But why stop there? It’d be nice to have an automatic inventory sorting button as well – there’s no way to sort your inventory in any capacity in this game, which means it often winds up messy and disorganized, plus it takes a while to sort manually. It’d also be a great idea to allow players to open their gates from a mobile app, which reduces the need to run all the way to the airport and mash through dialogue. This won’t happen, but I do feel like gold tools should be indestructible – it’s quite ridiculous that you have to go through all kinds of effort to get them, only for them to eventually break anyway. To add to this, in some cases gold tools are worse – with normal tools, you can customize them to refresh their durability up to max. Gold tools can’t be customized, so there’s no way around their durability limits right now. That’s also saying nothing of how much more difficult it is to get gold nuggets rather than iron nuggets.

Nook Miles Tickets are often used as a currency of sorts on online Animal Crossing trading sites… but good luck printing them yourself. The machine in the town hall only prints one Nook Miles Ticket at a time, meaning you have to sit through incredibly repetitive dialogue to print multiple. An option to print several tickets at once would be huge, especially for players who trade online with others a lot. On the new slumber islands, multiplayer players can edit them together. Perhaps after making a certain number of slumber islands, you can unlock the ability to invite players to your island to help out – but only if you give them permission to do so in settings. Being able to work on islands together would be a great way to enrich the game’s multiplayer experience, given that there’s very little to do together in multiplayer at the moment.

You could potentially go very far with more quality-of-life improvements, so let’s rapid-fire some more. The ability to choose the exact number of items to buy from the store (rather than just 1 or 5 at a time), restoring removed Nook Miles Ticket islands (like the blue flowers one), showing how much durability tools have left, further increasing the rate that you unlock new DIY recipes (rather than seeing repeat after repeat wash up on your island in a bottle), and the ability to expand the size of your home’s side rooms. Quality-of-life upgrades are the most likely additions to be on the table here, so it’d be great if they added a whole bunch. Bulk crafting is big, but Nintendo could always go further.

Other stuff

One thing that always struck me as odd is that Nook’s Cranny only upgrades once. In Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Nookling Junction had numerous upgrades: T&T Mart, Super T&T, T.I.Y., and T&T Emporium. It’s unreasonable to ask for four shop upgrades in New Horizons, but at least one more would go a long way. New Horizons in general removed a lot of the shops and upgrades that gave New Leaf so much longevity, and as a result player islands wind up feeling a little more stale. One more shop upgrade that includes more items per day would make Nook’s Cranny feel more worth it to check every day. Right now, it mainly only has items available from the base game, so if you’ve played New Horizons a lot, you probably aren’t checking Nook’s Cranny faithfully.

According to The Cutting Room Floor, a museum shop was planned for New Horizons but didn’t make it into the final version. In New Leaf, the museum shop sold silver versions of tools, as well as exclusive wallpapers, flooring, and furniture. Silver tools don’t exist at all in New Horizons, and considering that even gold tools break, there probably wouldn’t be much of a point to silver ones. But you could easily add some rare or exclusive furniture to warrant the existence of a museum shop.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is by far and away the most successful game in the franchise, but it isn’t perfect. We can’t expect a complete overhaul via updates – that’s most likely going to be saved for the next new game – but some quality-of-life changes and additional new content would help the wait feel a little bit shorter.

What changes would you like to see in New Horizons’ 3.0 update? Feel free to let us know in the comments down below.