Animal Crossing: New Horizons update serves up art and shrubs

With Bunny Day all wrapped up, Nintendo has revealed the next major update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The update is dropping later this week, and in addition to delivering the data for a number of upcoming seasonal events, it'll also be adding two familiar characters to the game: Leif and Jolly Redd.Animal Crossing veterans will know what that means, particularly when it comes to Jolly Redd. After this update has been applied, Redd will show up at your island every once in a while, with famous pieces of art in tow. It'll be up to you to determine which pieces are real and which are fake, and after you've done that and purchased the real pieces, you can donate them to the museum to help Blathers fill out his art collection.

Lief, on the other hand, will periodically show up in your town square to sell decorative items for your island. Nintendo's announcement says that those decorative items can include shrubs and flower seeds, so if your searches for a certain type of flower have turned up nothing, you might be able to find what you're looking for among Lief's stock.

This update will also set the stage for four new events. The first is Nature Day, which will run April 23rd to May 4th and give players Nook Miles challenges for doing things that involve nature – planting flowers, growing trees, etc. The May Day Tour will kick off on May 1st while the Nature Day event is still live, and gives players the chance to use a one-time May Day ticket to travel to a new island that contains "a special visitor who looks familiar."

The May Day Tour will run for the first week of May, wrapping up on the 7th. After a couple of weeks of silence, International Museum Day will kick off on May 18th, tasking players with visiting different museum exhibits to complete a stamp card in exchange for an in-game reward. After International Museum Day ends on May 31st, we dive right into Wedding Season on June 1st, which runs for the entire month of June and will let players unlock wedding-themed items by visiting Harvey's island.

So, in short, there's a lot happening in Animal Crossing: New Horizons over the next couple of months. This update is set to go live on April 23rd, so keep an eye out for its arrival at some point on Thursday.