I’ve not posted much about this, but I think it’s a good time to share some secrets about unreleased features in Animal Crossing that game code hints at…

Some of this might make it into the Earth Day update, some might change before release

Mute #ACspoilers if not interested

MUSEUM: There’s entries for two extra museum upgrades. All three levels (after the tent) seem to contain an art section.

There also seems to be two standalone buildings: the museum shop, and the museum cafe (which incorporates a Gyroid section)

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

Redd appears to have a ship which will dock on the ‘secret beach’ at the north of the island. That particular acre is called Nつねきち internally - つねきち is Redd’s Japanese name. The ‘fake art’ mechanic is coming back, but I don’t know more details

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

FAUNA: Bushes are coming back: azalea, hibiscus, holly, hydrangea, camellia, osmathus

Those might change; the list actually changed between 1.0.0 and 1.1.4!

Vegetables that you can grow and pick: tomato, wheat, sugar cane, potato, carrot, pumpkin

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

1.0.0 has a file for a “Seafood” Critterpedia page that’s supposed to contain 33 items; the only one actually in the released game is the manila clam.

There’s a 3rd Nook’s Cranny referenced, but no details on features or upgrade requirements.

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

Diving will allow you to obtain fish (a different set from fishing ofc) and seaweed. There’s a portion of the save file reserved to store them already!

(I’m not sure how, or if, this ties into the “Seafood” critterpedia page — not enough info yet)

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

Unused shopping interfaces: ‘cGardening’, ‘cMuseum’ (museum shop?), ‘cRealEstate’, ‘cGallery’

These might not be full-fledged shops. This particular system includes Nook Miles redemption, bridge/slope type purchases and Kicks’s shoes, for example

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

A few more loose ends which I don’t have enough info to draw a conclusion on:

The code that pops up a “select an item” box (to gift a villager, to sell, to swap a fish out for, etc) has a “cTunekichi” (Redd) option — will you be able to give him stuff?

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

There’s a function that stores a ‘play report’ (Nintendo’s aggregate stats on game play) with three variants: get_recipe_diy, get_recipe_clothing, get_recipe_cooking

Only the diy one is actually ever used. So, the other two might be in the plans

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

Some mentions of stuff in this thread have been removed from 1.1 onwards; the list mentioning ‘FlowerBush’ and vegetable names has been modified to list ‘FlBu, V0, V1, V2, …’ instead, one mention of Redd’s shop has gone from ‘TsunekichiShop’ to ‘TShop’

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

‘TShop’ is in what seems to be a list of doors that buildings can have. Since 1.1 they’ve added ‘WOffice’ as well, which isn’t actually used yet, but might be something they’re working on…

I’m guessing they caught on and started censoring these :p

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

That’s about all I’ve found so far, except for one more thing:

There’s a list of types for items where every type is used in the game, except for “Art” and “Dishes”.

Too much for a tweet, so I’ll post this screenshot

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

So, caveats.
First, I’ll explain how this most likely works behind-the-scenes (based off my game dev experience).

All of these features will exist to some degree in Nintendo’s source code and data files, probably including others we don’t know about…

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

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

Sometimes, things get overlooked and that’s what leads to leftovers like those in this thread. It’s obvious that after having built 1.0.0 and sent the ROM off for manufacture, they stepped up their game a bit, so 1.1 and up have less of these leftovers

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

This means we’ve got to make do with small bits of info, and we can’t tell if they’re work-in-progress features *or* things they scrapped.

Data files are easier to strip out than small sections of code, which is why we don’t have any graphics for these

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

I was looking through the day-to-day update code that deals with trees/flowers and saw something curious: a loop that grows a plant, call an empty function that returns 0, and if it returns 1, call another empty function.

Slightly suspicious, right?

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

As it turns out, there’s a bunch of empty functions like this, which act on a ‘Fg’ item (plant, tree, hole, rock, fence), interspersed with other Fg functions

And through leftover internal names, we can see they likely involve unreleased features…

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining

Here’s another fun example of how you can infer things from leftovers in a game

‘Player_PickupFullItem’ is the EventFlow script for when you press Y and your inventory is full

The message for vegetables has been left out, but the script is still there

#ACspoilers #ACdatamining