ACNH 2nd Anniversary Update 2022: Date, Cake & New Items of Animal Crossing New Horizons Second Anniversary

Time goes by and Animal Crossing New Horizons will celebrate its 2nd anniversary in March this year. What kind of new content will Nintendo update in the game to celebrate the game's 2nd birthday with players? Let's take a closer look with this post.

Animal Crossing New Horizons 2nd Anniversary Update Guide

While doing research for our Spring update and exclusive items, we realized that March 20th is fast approaching, and if you're unfamiliar March 20th, 2020 was when Animal Crossing New Horizons was officially released for the Switch. Last year on March 20th, 2021, Nintendo released a special first-anniversary commemorative item - the first anniversary cake. And in this year, we still can expect to see the ACNH 2nd Anniversary Update will be here. 

But just remember Nintendo said no more free major updates, free minor updates are still on the table, and adding a few items for celebrating the Anniversary to the game is as minor as it gets. What’s more, we think the Anniversary is really a good chance to bring new content and get players back into the game.

ACNH 2nd Anniversary Update

March 20th, 2022

When will the ACNH 2nd Anniversary Update Come Out? There is no doubt, the second Anniversary of Animal Crossing New Horizons is dropping on March 20th, 2022, but if Nintendo wants to make something new to refresh the ACNH Birthday event, new content or activities would be rolled out in the game advanced and possibly on March 18th, 2022. 

ACNH 2nd Anniversary Items

Still, if an Anniversary celebration takes place, there are new exclusive items will be added to the game. What Items We Can Expect To Get In ACNH 2nd Anniversary Update?

1. Second Anniversary Cake

Last year, the first-anniversary cake was released into ACNH on March 18, 2021, as part of the 1.9.0 update, this update was substantial and added many more features and items into the game including the Sanrio villagers and item set, more custom design slots, and new seasonal items. It also introduced a small event where you would receive a letter from Nook Inc. in your mailbox. Everyone who updated to the game version 1.9.0 would receive this present in their mail, even if they had only been playing for less than a year. Attached to this letter was an adorable cake that resembles terraformed cliffs with a fruity layer, complete with grass as frosting and adorable cookies featuring the Nook Inc. leaf, an apple tree, a cedar tree, a ladder, and a terraforming hard hat one on each side, small bushes complete the cake's decor and a number one candle sits on top that you can blow out and relight. 

Now, this First-Anniversary cake may seem like an ordinary cake but it is so much more than that it can tell us a lot about future updates coming to the Animal Crossing New Horizons. Because the first-anniversary cake was taken out of the game 41 days later with the introduction of the 1.10.0 update released on April 28th once you updated to 1.10.0. Your window of opportunity to get your Nook Inc. letter was gone, only the players who updated to 1.9.0 and check their mailboxes would get this item. So if you started playing Animal Crossing New Horizons after April 28th, 2021, you missed out on getting your first anniversary cake with no other way to get it in the game. Once the player is updated to 1.10.0, their window of opportunity to get the first anniversary cake vanished, no amount of time traveling back to that time frame could get you this item,41 days was all you got, this makes the first anniversary cake the only item you can no longer obtain in any way in New Horizons, every other item you can get by time traveling in the most extreme cases. 

Now Animal Crossing New Horizons is currently on game version 2.0.5 and if you time travel to March 20th, 2022 there is no anniversary item in game. However the following theory assumes, we will get a second anniversary item later this month, the existence of the first anniversary cake brought two updates with it 1.9.0 to add the cake into the game and 1.10.0 to take the keg out of the game. If we see a second anniversary item that follows the same pattern, it's expected that we'll see a 2.0.6 and a 2.0.7 update to introduce and remove the celebratory item, so that's two more updates we could get for a game most people think will receive no more updates. But just remember Nintendo said no more free major updates, free minor updates are still on the table and adding one item to the game is as minor as it gets.

2. New Anniversary Theme Items

Another argument is would we even get a second anniversary item this year, the first anniversary is always the most important, so maybe Nintendo won't bother with the second, third, fourth and so on anniversary item, but that depends on Nintendo's subjective opinion on which game anniversaries are important enough to celebrate in-game other than modeling these items. No reason why Nintendo wouldn't continue with the tradition at least until the 5th anniversary, a set of cute cakes marking important milestones of the game could just be a small way to keep players interested, since we don't know when another mainline Animal Crossing game could be released, maybe players would hear that some new items were introduced and log on to their Animal Crossing islands that they haven't touched for a few month. As Nintendo usually did not update their seasonal holiday with new content, so we do think the second Anniversary is the opportunity to make players sing like butterfly and smile like bee.