I played Animal Crossing: New Horizons for a pretty solid year before I found myself taking a break from the game. I think it was around Easter of this year when I ended up putting it down, mostly because I felt that there were not a lot of new things in the event or game.

Not that I’m anywhere near being finished with it. I haven’t even really sat down and figured out what I want my island’s design to be. Unlike some of those amazing islands I see out there, mine is pretty bland and unorganized.

When dream visiting released, I thought it was finally a chance to hop around to other islands to obtain inspiration. Only, originally, you had to have codes in order to visit an island. For me, searching for codes and inputting them was more work than I wanted to do just to find inspiration. I’d hoped I could just randomly visit islands in dreams – something they implemented eventually. But by that time, I’d fallen away from logging in.

So now, I’ve heard we’re getting a huge update – the final update – to New Horizons and it sounds fantastic! I won’t go into listing all the new and quality of life content we’ll be getting for free – this site does a great job of rounding up all that information. But it was enough to catch my attention and make me log in to clear the weeds.

On top of that, we’re getting the first Animal Crossing DLC that blends the features of Happy Home Designer (which I do own but never got very far into) with New Horizons.

Again, I won’t go into all the information on this DLC, but I do plan to pick it up. It sounds just the thing for folks who (unlike me) have reached end game with designing their own island.

This DLC comes two ways – a straight out purchase for $25 or as part of an upgrade with Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack. I know that I’m going to straight up buy the DLC because I’m not sure if I’m going to upgrade my Switch Online yet. I like having the service, but I also don’t use what I have as much as I should already. I’m going to wait and see on whether the N64 lineup is worth it to me – there were some games that I loved from that system, but it wasn’t one of the systems I owned a ton of games for.

I don’t want the hassle of not having DLC content should I decide to drop the Switch Online Expansion service in the future. As far as I’m concerned $25 is a fair price for a hefty DLC that I’ll probably put time into and enjoy.

All that to say, I’m going to be squeezing in time to dream hop and see if I can’t make my own island something I’m a bit more proud of going forward. Not to mention the Halloween event actually does seem to have new items this year, so I’m there for that!