Animal Crossing: New Horizons datamine reveals potential hint to island expansion

By Hope Bellingham
published

Islands may be about to get a whole lot bigger.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons secret beach
(Image credit: Nintendo)

Animal Crossing: New Horizons players could soon be getting some kind of island expansion, if recent rumours prove accurate. 

Thanks to a recent datamine into the Animal Crossing update 2.0, some fans think that players may be getting some kind of extension to the beach. This came about due to a line of code titled “mSouthShoreBaseline.f32:500.00000” being seemingly doubled to “mSouthShoreBaseline.f32:10000.00000” in the game.

It's not totally clear exactly what this means, but some fans are assuming that with this adjustment, players would be able to extend their camera view when standing on the southern beach.

This small change has got fans theorising about why Nintendo would want to extend the game’s camera parameters, with some considering the possibility of a second, smaller island being added to the bottom of player’s island maps. Elsewhere, other players are speculating about more deep-sea diving opportunities in the future. 

This isn’t the only thing spotted in the code of April’s update. Dodo Codes has also pointed out the possibility of fan favourite Brewster making a return. The pigeon barista was first inducted into the Animal Crossing series back in 2005 and has since appeared in every game except New Horizons, where he is one of many missing Animal Crossing: New Horizons characters that we’d like to see make a return. 

It’s wise to take this rumour with a pinch of salt though, as nothing official has been announced or even hinted towards by Nintendo, and this could just be the developer making small changes behind the scenes. Nevertheless, this hasn’t stopped us from getting excited about potential new features being added to Animal Crossing: New Horizons in the future. 

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Hope Bellingham
Hope Bellingham
News Writer

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training.  My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.