Jeff's New Horizons Blog

One cool thing I’ve noticed about Slumber Islands involves the animals you can invite to appear there. The list contains not only your current villagers, but also your previous villagers. Remember seeing these villagers in Forest?

After paying Tom Nook 1.5 million bells Wednesday night, my storage was expanded to hold 7,000 items on Thursday. I know I can expand it again to 9,000, but I’m not in a rush to do that right now.

I encountered my 2nd tourist on Thursday, it was O’Hare the rabbit.

Leilani told me about the mannequins, and I displayed a frog suit on one of them. The mannequin outfits will be useful for multiplayer sessions, although I don’t have anything specific themes in mind so far.

I designed another hotel room, and I was given an option to design a Japanese room or a modern room. I chose the latter, and I used some iron, tubular, and cool furniture.

I earned another 200 hotel tickets for designing the room, but no tourists showed up to rent it like they did with the first room.

I was informed by Mr_DotoroBear that you can use the “L” button jump and slide. I later learned that it’s actually to help when using the Island Designer app (so you can clearly discern which space you’re on and move to the next one quickly). But I noticed that if you press L on a bridge, it doesn’t work…and your character makes a disappointed face. 😆

On Friday, I went to design Room 3. For the theme, I could choose a simple room or a ranch room. I chose the latter, and of course I mostly used ranch furniture. I’m not putting tons of effort into these things. 😛

Anicotti and Jacob were the tourists for the day. I found Anicotti over by Resident Services, and she said somebody should offer a swim/dive/fish tour. That’s pretty bold of Nintendo to mention tours when it just reminds me of the island tours from New Leaf that aren’t in this game. 😛

Yesterday, I designed Room 4 at the hotel. I chose to make a kiddie room instead of a dreamy room, and I used a lot of these new kiddie items. Unfortunately, this kiddie slide still can’t be used. Slides need to be usable items! 😆

Tipper, Axel, and Coco were the tourists for the day. Interestingly enough, Coco wanted cocoa! What a co-incidence.

Today, I spotted Monty the monkey walking around outside my house as I checked my mail. Monty recently moved out of my City Folk town, so it caught me off guard to see him here. I guess I’ll have to get used to these surprises. 😛 Bubbles, Chester, and Fauna were the other tourists for the day.

I didn’t design a hotel room today, but I think it might be a bit overwhelming once I get to the point where there’s eight tourists in town every day! That seems like overkill, especially considering we can only have ten villagers of our own.

I found Chester in Able Sisters, so you can indeed find tourists in shops as well.

Here are a few other quick notes from the past few days:

• On Thursday, Gulliver sent me a tubeteika.
• I learned that customization kits can also be used from storage, so there’s no need to carry them with you.
• Friday, I sold 32 bugs to Flick for 144,750 bells.
• Last night, K.K. Slider performed “K.K. Mambo” for me, June, and Bob.
• I built a perfect snowboy yesterday, and he sent me another three-tiered snowperson today.

I recently posted a video showing highlights of my first two days with the Version 3.0 update. So please check it out if you haven’t seen it yet.

I may also have another video for tomorrow, so stay tuned for that!

And FYI, I’m still planning on having a Friday Night Forest this week (January 23rd). But don’t expect me to have a new obstacle course ready just yet.

The New Horizons Version 3.0 update launched today, a day ahead of schedule! Even though I figured that might happen, I thought tonight was more likely…but it was out quite early in the day!

As I started up the game, Isabelle informed me that a hotel has been built on the pier! So I quickly made my way over there to take a look.

I went inside to meet everyone (meaning Kapp’n’s family, basically). Tom Nook said this hotel was built so that more people can visit Forest. But of course, Leilani said that she’s not good at designing hotel rooms. Makes you wonder how/why they’re in the hotel business if they can’t make the rooms. 😛

Much of the new content requires a hotel room to be open, so I felt like I had to design a room right away. Each room will have a theme, and the first one had a “seaside” theme. As some of you may know, I’m not really into designing rooms, and I don’t spend a whole lot of time on them. I just plopped down some rattan furniture, added a surfboard, and slapped some fish onto the wall. 😆 But Room #1 is done!

I went back downstairs to the hotel lobby, and I earned some hotel tickets for designing the room. And just like that, our first guest appeared. It was one of my former villagers, Marcel! He was also the first villager to leave my island in April 2020.

Even though Marcel didn’t seem to remember Forest while in the lobby, he did remember me (and Forest) once I visited him up in his room.

I earned some new Nook Miles, and it appears that Version 3.0 has opened up three new Nook Miles goals.

When I exited the hotel, Tom Nook started to tell me about crafting Forest goods. There’s a donation box next to the pier, where I can deposit the needed items and earn hotel tickets immediately. The idea is that Kapp’n will then export these items to make Forest more well-known.

Among the initial items requested were three axes, a green grass skirt, and a chocolate herringbone wall. That seems so random! As you craft and deposit items, new requests appear immediately. It seems to be never-ending, and I don’t care for that.

Remember early in the game, you had to collect materials to build and stock the initial homes on the island? That actually made sense, but this seems like just pointless busywork.

I was surprised when I noticed how far the new pier extends into the water. It’s just a few feet from the underwater boundary of how far we can swim! It doesn’t look like Kapp’n has room to even propel his boat forward…not to mention the bottleneck it will create when we go diving.

I decided to craft a few of the requested items. As I knew, you can now select the quantity of items crafted…but I was also happy to see that you can craft with materials in storage! At least when you’re on your own island, of course.

That’s very convenient on its own, but I realized what else that meant: We no longer need to keep materials in our pockets! I normally have basically an entire row of my pockets devoted to materials I may need for crafting. That’s not necessary at all now! (Again, unless you’re going to another island.) But freeing up a whole row of pocket space is a convenience I wasn’t even hoping for! The crafting improvements are even better than expected! 🔥

While making my rounds, I ran into Resetti! He told me about his reset service, but I was shocked when he told me the price: 60,000 bells per day! I thought he was joking, but he was not!

But there are two bits of good news. When you use it, it covers unlimited cleanups on that day. So you’ll want to use it to clean up everything you need at once, so that you don’t need him back day after day. The other good thing is that the first use is free.

When using the service, you can choose the whole island, just the beach, or a selected area that you choose. I picked the area myself, because I wanted to use the service to remove my Animal Crossing museum, which I built within castle walls. But I quickly discovered a problem with this method. Even though you can select the “starting point,” the size of the rectangle is fixed. So you can’t select the dimensions or choose a huge area. It’s basically the size of one screen, but this will show it better:

This probably isn’t a feature I’ll be using very often. But for those of you who have lots of furniture items scattered around, want to clean up tons of unwanted flowers, or are completely redoing your town, this will be very helpful.

I ran into Marcel walking around town, which is nice.

But I have not seen any new dialogue from my villagers so far…not even to mention the hotel! I’m not saying there’s not any dialogue in there somewhere, but I haven’t encountered any yet.

At Resident Services, I told Tom Nook I’d like to attend the completion ceremony for the hotel. Marcel joined in too.

Tom Nook also told me about the ability to expanded my storage, but the price is a whopping 1.5 million bells. Yikes! Adding insult to injury, you have to have all the bells in your pockets! You can’t pay out of your savings account, which feels outdated and stupid now that you can craft furniture using items in storage. Making a payment from your account is much more logical than physically crafting items you don’t have with you!

I briefly checked out one of my Slumber Islands, but I haven’t done much with it yet. I’ll get to that more another day.

I know I still need to design more hotel rooms, ship more requested items, and buy that megaphone I forgot about today. So I have much more to do in Version 3.0, and I’m sure there’s more that I’m not even aware of yet. But this update provides some nice new additions that will probably keep me busy for a few weeks at least. It’s not the same as a whole new game and a new town of course, but it will help hold us over for a while.

Are you all enjoying it? Let me know in the comments! And let me know who your first hotel visitor was, and if they were a previous islander of yours!

Here are a few other quick notes about this week:

• On Sunday night, K.K. Slider performed “K.K. Aria” for me.
• My latest snowboy sent me a three-tiered snowperson on Tuesday.
• Kidd was camping at the campsite for the third time. I like him, but I’m not going to kick someone out for him.

I’ll be back with another entry soon as I continue to explore Version 3.0! Hope to see you again soon!

On Monday, Charlise was camping at my campsite…for the 5th time!

That’s five visits, just in the last two and a half years! Sorry, Charlie, but you need to stop. I don’t want you here. 😛

On Wednesday, I noticed billow clouds once again in the sky. I’m seeing them more frequently lately, so I probably don’t need to keep mentioning it every time, but they are pretty! And I thought this made a unique screenshot with the airport and Nook’s Cranny.

I decided to take a screenshot of my town map before the update arrives next week.

While I don’t know how much the map screen will change, we’ll at least have an icon for the hotel on the pier. We’ll see if any other surprises are in store!

The winter fishing tournament was held today, and I found Agent S and Kid Cat fishing together. But of course, neither of them were catching anything.

I played one round of the fishing tourney, and I caught seven fish within the three-minute time limit.

That was good for nine points. I sold my fish for 3,105 bells, and then I redeemed ten points for a prize: a fish pochette.

Here are a few other quick notes about this week:

• Last Sunday, I gave medicine to a sick Bob. He rewarded me with a baby romper.
• Wednesday, I returned a lost bag to Ankha. She gave me a throwback container.
• I helped out Gullivarrr yesterday, and he sent me another pirate-ship cannon today. Nice!

We’re less than a week away from the Version 3.0 update! I’m sure I’ll be trying out all the new features next weekend. But the following week (January 23rd), I might open my gate for a Friday Night Forest. Anyone on my roster will be welcome.

I’ll be back with another entry next week to let you know my impressions of the update. Hope to see you then!