Good morning, everyone! If you, like me, popped open Animal Crossing: New Horizons before work today for a stroll around your island, you were greeted with a pleasant surprise: the 3.0 update just dropped a day early, and the Hotel is officially open for business, along with a number of other new features.
The meat of Animal Crossing: New Horizon 3.0 is a hotel that will set up on your island at the end of your pier, wherever that’s located for you. Just download the update (make sure you actually download it – there was a system update this morning as well for me and I almost missed it!) and it should be there waiting for you if you’re a returning player who put some time into your island already. It seems likely there is at least one other requirement for the hotel to show up that prevents it from being there for new players, but we’re still working out just what that is.
The hotel works a lot like the Happy Home DLC: you’ll be asked to decorate different rooms in it based on themes you’re given from Leilani. However, unlike the DLC, the catalog is the limit on what all you can put in these rooms. Though you’re given a list of recommended items if you need help, apart from that, any item you’ve ever collected (via DIY, purchase, gift, or whatever) is available for use in the hotel, as many times as you want.
Whenever you finish a room, it will become available for guests to stay in. This is a great way to meet other villagers you don’t have living on your island at the moment, as they’ll come stay and share cute and unique dialogue. You’ll also be given Hotel Tickets, which you can spend at the souvenir shop for unique decor newly added to the game that you can use in your own house or elsewhere on the island.
Additionally, outside the hotel, Tom Nook will invite you to use a box outside the hotel where you’ll be asked to craft certain DIY items to help promote your island elsewhere. Completing these requests will get you more Hotel Tickets to spend on more items. And, by the way, DIY crafting is easier than ever now that bulk crafting and crafting using ingredients from storage has been enabled with the new update.
In addition to all this, there are several other new additions: There’s tons of new furniture available both via the Souvenir Shop and the Nook Shopping app, including a bunch of LEGO items and classic game systems that you can use to activate games using Nintendo Switch Online from within Animal Crossing. Dream Worlds are now active, and let you build and decorate up to three Dream Islands either alone or with friends. And the new Zelda and Splatoon-themed amiibo villagers and themed items are available if you scan their amiibo.
Now, as of 1/14/2026, there are still a few new features you’ll have to wait for. Because while the 3.0 content update is now live, the Nintendo Switch 2 paid update feature isn’t available until tomorrow. So everything that comes with that update: improved graphics, 12-person multiplayer, the Megaphone item, and so forth, that’s not in the game just yet. But it will be soon, just hang in there one more day!
We’ve got a comprehensive guide to the 3.0 update, including how to unlock everything and what’s included, as a part of our Animal Crossing: New Horizons Wiki guide. If you’re just getting back to New Horizons today after a long hiatus, we also have a number of tips for people getting back into the swing of things.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
