A light is appearing at the end of the bright, pastel tunnel for Animal Crossing: New Horizons players, as Nintendo has announced that it's finally fixing its horrible Bunny Day egg problem. The seasonal Easter-themed event has been both a fun quarantine distraction and a cutely painted nightmare for the Animal Crossing playerbase, and this highly requested update is right on time.
Bunny Day has been an interesting experiment for future holiday updates in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, introducing a plethora of cute furniture and clothing items that can be crafted from painted eggs chopped from trees, fished from waters, and dropped out of the sky via balloon. If Animal Crossing: New Horizons got anything perfectly right on release, it was its masterfully tuned pace of gameplay, giving players just the right amount of shells, creatures, and trinkets to collect while going about their days. Since it was rolled out, players have been frustrated with how the Bunny Day event broke that balance by replacing almost every other fish with water eggs and raining down a tempestuous onslaught of noisy rainbow balloons bearing sky eggs and seasonal recipes.
Soon, Zipper's aerial oppression of players' islands will take a significant blow. Nintendo of Japan Customer Support tweeted that winds of change will usher in the Animal Crossing: New Horizons 1.1.4 update, which is available for download now. The Japanese patch notes are sparse and quite vague, but a rough translation yields, "During the Easter event, the appearance rate of some eggs has been adjusted until April 11, 2020." Presumably to help players catch up at the event's end, high egg rates will return on April 12. Details are quite fuzzy, but players are reporting an apparent reduction in Bunny Day balloon spawns. Unfortunately, disgruntled fishers will be annoyed to know that the disproportionate rate of water eggs seems unchanged for now, so their Animal Crossing nightmare may be far from over.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a phenomenal time waster for a quarantined population bored out of its wits, and the game plays best when everything is working as players have come to expect. However, when its near-perfect gameplay loop has been thrown so far out of whack, players have understandably been feeling swindled out of their time by the Bunny Day event. Reducing the sheer volume of sky egg balloons whizzing over players' heads is a great start - and reverting egg rates to their initial frenzy on the event's final day is a generous boon for players scrambling to craft remaining recipes - but something still needs to be done about the plague of water eggs in the waterways and seas.
As irritating as water eggs continue to be for players (and as chillingly creepy as Bunny Day ringleader Zipper can be), the community's high expectations for how the game should play is entirely reflective of what a joy Animal Crossing: New Horizons is at its genial core. It's a shared experience that delivers as many heartwarming moments outside of the game as it does during play, so players' concerns over how holidays will be handled further down the road point to its probable longevity more than anything else.
Source: Nintendo Customer Support via Twitter, Nintendo Support