The August update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons just released, and players have wasted no time posting dream addresses to invite others to their islands. The new content is everything the Animal Crossing update trailer promised, and is sure to keep fans busy for a while. Players can enjoy fireworks every Sunday evening in August, explore strangers’ islands via dreaming, and are finally able to backup their data to the Nintendo Switch Online Save Data Cloud service.
One of the unique characteristics that makes New Horizons so special is that updates continue to happen as time goes on, keeping players engaged long after its March 2020 release. Fans have already experienced a few major updates over the past few months, and more are sure to come. Nintendo has already announced there will be a fall update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. However, with the exception of the teaser for the pumpkin-headed Jack making a reappearance from previous Animal Crossing games, little else is known in regards to the future of New Horizons — at least officially.
Dataminer Ninji is popular for sharing his New Horizons coding discoveries on Twitter. He had already predicted the appearance of Redd, art within the museum, the arrival of bushes, diving and more — all well before Nintendo confirmed any of that content. His latest datamine reveals coding that hints at more new features to be released, possibly as soon as the next fall update.
What's Coming To New Horizons Next?
When a new update comes out, potential future content can sometimes be found within the coding. Datamined code in the last Animal Crossing: New Horizons update suggests players may soon see the appearance of vegetables, gyroids, a new bush type (Plumeria), sewing, and cooking DIYs. However, this isn’t the first time Ninji has uncovered coding for vegetables. He had previously announced some Animal Crossing findings regarding tomatoes, wheat, sugar cane, potatoes and carrots back in April 2020.
Though much of Ninji's findings did come to pass, vegetables were one of the things players still haven’t seen come into fruition in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but data strongly suggests that they will be introduced, and hopefully soon. It feels appropriate for vegetables to be available during the harvest season, and the hint about cooking could mean players can use their farmed crops for culinary purposes. However, the details for cooking, the new Plumeria bush, and sewing are still quite vague.
Besides vegetables, the mentioning of “Gyroids” is another highly anticipated feature. Fans of previous Animal Crossing games have been asking for these odd pieces of furniture since New Horizons first came out. The introduction of Luna in the last update was accompanied by a little gyroid that appears next to the player’s bed when dreaming. This could be a sneak peek at more to come. The specific info Ninji mentions reads as “35_Gyroid,” but whether or not that means 35 different gyroids is left for speculation. However, he’s already mentioned coding for a cafe section within the museum, a feature present in other Animal Crossing games. The coding also hinted that the cafe would incorporate gyroids, and in the past, a pigeon NPC named Brewster would run the cafe and store gyroids for the player.
It’s important to keep in mind that what is found via datamining in no way guarantees the appearance of this content; it is simply there in case the creators decide to use it. Ninji explains further, “In games (and software in general), unfinished and debugging features are automatically excluded from public builds by marking those sections of code and data specially. Sometimes they forget to do this, which is why we end up with stray references like these.” It’s likely Nintendo has been working up a way to implement these new features into Animal Crossing: New Horizons over time, but all this data certainly seems to suggest they are coming. Little seems to be known about the new bush type, cooking, and sewing features — and it is entirely possible they may never show up at all — but it wouldn’t be too surprising if vegetables and gyroids were introduced as soon as the fall update.
Source: Ninji/Twitter