The Animal Crossing: New Horizons 2.0 update dropped unexpectedly with an early release. While the 2.0 update was scheduled for Friday, November 5, some players were able to download it the night of November 3. The 2.0 update Animal Crossing: New Horizons has introduced several new features and brought back returning characters, and among the newly added features to Animal Crossing: New Horizons is Island Ordinances.
With four different Island Ordinances available, players will be able to customize their Animal Crossing: New Horizons experience based on their preferences. While Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been all about customization for fans since its launch in 2020, the addition of Early Bird, Night Owl, Bell Boom, and Beautiful Island Ordinances means that the game can be better tailored to each players’ wants and needs. Each of the newly added Island Ordinances is also going to come with its own perks. For late-game and aesthetically oriented fans in particular, the Beautiful Island Ordinance is going to be the best option available after downloading the Animal Crossing: New Horizons 2.0 update.
Benefits of the Beautiful Island Ordinance
The Beautiful Island Ordinance won’t bring the riches of bells or give players wheat in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but it will help in maintaining the island’s beauty. One of the key parts of the Beautiful Island Ordinance is how it changes flower behavior. Flowers themselves can be easily found in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but maintaining a lavish garden can be difficult. Flowers can wilt and die if they’re dry and trampled, making watering flowers an important activity when maintaining an island. The only problem is that, after a while, amassing a lavish garden can mean players spend a considerable amount of time walking around their island just watering flowers.
With the Beautiful Island Ordinance, weeds will not spread, giving fans a bit more flexibility when it comes to maintaining their island’s aesthetic. This helps to keep flower beds looking immaculate, but also leads to other benefits. Alongside the nicer flower parches in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, with the Beautiful Island ordinance, hybrid flowers become easier to obtain as well. These types of flowers use unique color combinations that otherwise can be difficult to acquire. While breeding hybrid flowers comes in varying degrees of difficulty, using the Beautiful Island Ordinance can increase hybrid flowers' spawn rates by 20%, and special flora and fauna from Kapp'n's Mystery Tours can really help to develop an island's environment.
These effects coupled with the increased probability of villagers watering flowers should help players cut back on how much time they have to spend maintaining their gardens. While it might not seem like much, those players dedicated to maintaining sprawling fields of flowers in tandem with other island customization options now have a game-changing improvement in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The perks of the Beautiful Island Ordinance extend past gardening, however.
Players should also notice an overall improvement to the game’s overworld when it comes to the spawn rate of unwanted items. Maintaining flowers is only one part of having a beautiful island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, with trash, weeds, and cockroaches making up another part. For those players who are familiar with how islands can look after taking some time away from Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a jungle of weeds and randomly spawning cockroaches are likely a familiar sight.
With the Beautiful Island Ordinance in Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ 2.0 update, fans should notice that cockroaches are gone and weeds appear less often. An integral part of a beautiful island is not having either of these nuisances present, and it should no longer be an obstacle for players that have their attention elsewhere. With all the characters confirmed to appear on Harv’s Island, however, players could miss out on farming weeds in exchange for bells from Leif, making this a pro-con situation.
Still, the elimination of weeds and cockroaches is complemented by the lack of trash that will be fished out of the water and the elimination of time traveling’s effects on the island’s environment with the Beautiful Island Ordinance. While not as much of a nuisance as cockroaches and weeds, these two could be downers for some players. Not fishing out trash should increase the bell-to-fish ratio that players see, while time traveling no longer effecting the environment could help fans who enjoy manipulating the Stalk Market but still want things to look neat. With less time being needed to maintain an impressive island, the effort-reward values should also help to reinforce just how beneficial the Beautiful Island Ordinance is for Animal Crossing: New Horizons players.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available now for Nintendo Switch.