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How to change ordinances - Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Everything you need to know about ordinances in the 2.0 Update of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Bill Lavoy

November 4, 2021 1:30 PM

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Animal Crossing: New Horizons released its 2.0 Update and with it came ordinances that can give you more input over how life is lived on your island. In this guide, I’ll be talking about what ordinances are available, and how you can change them.

How to change ordinances

Speak to Isabelle at Resident Services to change ordinances. Just know that only one ordinance can be active at a time, so think carefully about which one makes the most sense for you. It will also set you back 20,000 Bells each time you enact an ordinance, but that’s not many Bells to worry about. You can make that back grabbing junk off your beaches in about 10 minutes.

Below are the conversation options with Isabelle to enact an ordinance:

• Review island features
• Discuss ordinances
• Yes, please!

Once you go through those conversation options, you’ll be presented with four possible island ordinances to choose from. They are as follows:

• Beautiful Island ordinance
• Early Bird ordinance
• Night Owl ordinance
• Bell Boom ordinance

What does each ordinance do?

Each ordinance has a different benefit. Some will alter the way your villagers behave, and some the time of day that your island is active.

Beautiful Island ordinance

Villagers will assist with weeding, watering flowers, and clearing trash from the waters. This can be particularly useful if you have taken some time off and want to clean the weeds off your island without paying Leif to do it or running around and doing it all by yourself.

Early Bird ordinance

This will cause your villagers to be more active in the morning, and businesses will open earlier. This can be handy if you play a lot in the morning but find that shops like Nook’s Cranny are open hours after you’ve finished up for the day. This should help you to have more interactions with your community and be able to visit shops on your own schedule.

Night Owl ordinance

This is the opposite of the Early Bird ordinance. This will cause your shops to stay open later, which is ideal for folks like myself who tend to play either in the evening or in the middle of the night. I’m not much of a morning player, so villagers being up and about early in the day does nothing for my play style.

Bell Boom ordinance

This is an interesting one. Bell Boom would cause the cost of things you buy on your island to increase, but you would also get more from selling items. If you don’t need to buy much, but would like to make some extra Bells, this might be a good one to try. I’m not sure it’s for me, as I’d much rather have someone watering flowers, or keeping shops open later.

It’s worth noting that it will take until the following day to enact an ordinance. This will prevent you from finding a good item in Nook’s Cranny that you want to buy, then quickly swapping ordinances to grab it on the cheap. It’s a standard waiting period for something in New Horizons to activate.

Now that you know all about ordinances, be sure to visit our Animal Crossing: New Horizons guide. It’s there that we have loads of helpful articles for you to browse through, making life in Tom Nook’s world a bit more pleasant.

Bill Lavoy

Managing Editor

Bill, who is also known as Rumpo, is a lifelong gamer and Toronto Maple Leafs fan. He made his mark early in his career through guide writing and a deep understanding of editorial SEO. He enjoys putting in the work to create a great content, be it a wild feature or grinding out an in-depth collectible guide. Tweet him @RumpoPlays if you have a question or comment about one of his articles.