Animal Crossing: New Horizons Gets Details on April's Bunny Day and Earth Day Updates

We're less than a week out from the launch of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and as it happens, less than a week away from its first limited time event. From April 1 to 12, an Easter-adjacent Bunny Day event will be running in New Horizons, seeing the arrival of Zipper T. Bunny and a handful of craftable egg-themed furniture and decor. Then, later in April, an Earth Day event will be delivered by way of another free update.

As explained with a short video in today's Nintendo Mini Direct presentation, the Bunny Day event content was delivered with the free 1.1.0 update pushed to New Horizons shortly before it launched. Nintendo will handle all of New Horizons' limited time events this way, so as to discourage manipulating the system time for the sake of speeding through all that Animal Crossing has to offer.

Zipper and Bunny Day were first introduced in Animal Crossing: City Folk. When Zipper arrives on your island community, you'll be able to roam around searching for hidden eggs—these can be buried in holes like fossils or reeled in with a fishing rod. Presumably, you'll need to do a lot of egg hunting if you want to craft everything in the Bunny Day collection.

Animal Crossing has included a small "Nature Day" event in past games on April 22, the same day as Earth Day, but it seems like it might be a more involved affair this time around. Who knows, maybe Earth Day's equivalent of Zipper will chew you out for using your Nook Miles Tickets to go strip other islands of all the wood, fruit, and iron they have to offer. Probably not, though.

New Horizons has had a wildly successful launch. In Japan alone, it sold 1.8 million units in its first three days after release, and globally it has already sold more copies than all previous Animal Crossing games combined, giving it the biggest launch for the Switch so far save for the combined numbers of Pokemon Sword and Shield.

For more on Animal Crossing: New Horizons, read Senior Editor Caty McCarthy's review and head over to our guides hub for everything you need to get your island humming along.