Animal Crossing: New Horizons has a tiered content rollout. The more you play the game and the longer you play it for, the more you unlock. For example, after 30 days of using the island store, it will close for upgrades and open with a wider item range. This week, data miner Ninji reported on details in the game code that indicate even more island upgrades may be coming.
Ninji took to Twitter this week to detail the hints they found in main game and update code via data mining, with indications that these changes could make their way into the upcoming Earth Day content drop. It’s important to note that these findings have not been verified or confirmed by official Nintendo sources.
The first finding was in regards to the island Museum. According to Ninji, game code indicates an art section will be added to the Museum alongside a museum shop and additional café (likely run by barista pigeon, Brewster).
The data also referred to an appearance by Redd, a trickster fox that previously made a living by selling players fake artwork. According to Ninji, Redd will appear on a ship that docks at the ‘secret beach’ on the north of player islands.
Code for bushes including azalea, hibiscus, holly, hydrangea, camellia and osmanthus was reportedly found by Ninji, as well as code for vegetables you can pick and grow including tomato, wheat, sugar cane, potato, carrot and pumpkin.
The original game’s data is also reported to contain an entry for ‘seafood’ in the Critterpedia with 33 items listed (one of them being the manila clam, which is currently found in-game.) The last mainline Animal Crossing entry, New Leaf contained a diving minigame where players were able to enter the water and search for other kinds of fish. This missing ‘seafood’ code may relate to this feature as code for diving was also reportedly found.
A third update for the Nook’s Cranny store was also found during data mining.
You can see Ninji’s entire thread here, with additional details about extraneous code reportedly extracted. According to the data miner, it’s likely that some of the features they found may be developer-only or leftover bits of code from early development.
They’ll be set up so that code and data related to a feature is only compiled into the game when a particular toggle is set. Their dev builds will have lots of debugging options and menus that are just excluded from the builds *we* get, for example#ACspoilers #ACdatamining
— Ninji ???????????????????????????????????????????? (@_Ninji) April 19, 2020
Still, the findings are very intriguing.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons‘ slow content rollout keeps the game engaging and gives players new things to explore with every update. While these new features aren’t currently confirmed, they’d go a long way towards make the action of Animal Crossing: New Horizons more robust and fun.
Stay tuned for more news about the next Animal Crossing content drop.
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