I’ve been waiting years for Animal Crossing’s best new features
TL;DR
The author, despite extensive playtime, found Animal Crossing: New Horizons' decorating systems slow and cumbersome. An upcoming update in 2026 aims to address these issues, bringing long-awaited improvements.
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I never felt done with my Animal Crossing: New Horizons island. Despite playing every day for two years, and racking up 1,700 hours of playtime, I somehow never finished decorating. I had plenty of ideas for my island, sure, but actually implementing them was another story: The decorating and terraforming systems that helped make New Horizons a huge success are also slow, manual, and cumbersome, and my patience for decorating and redecorating had finally worn thin.
Fast-forward a few years, and a very much unexpected update is coming to finally fix some of those pain points. Update 3.0 is launching on January 15th, 2026, alongside the Swit …