In a seemingly unprecedented move, an Xbox achievement has been completely deleted from a recently-released game.
The game in question is Homestead Arcana, a cozy farming title with a magical theme that launched onto Xbox and PC as a day one Game Pass release in April. One of the achievements, called You Can't Be Too Prepared, required you to craft at least one of every item in the game. Unfortunately, players soon found that one of the required items was impossible to craft due to a glitch, leaving the achievement unobtainable.
Now that achievement has been removed from the game entirely, as TrueAchievements reports. The 100 gamerscore associated has been reallocated to other achievements, so the game still offers the full 1,000 points it's supposed to.
I've been unable to dig up any other reference to an Xbox achievement having been deleted in the past - if this isn't a first, it's still an exceedingly rare occurrence. Achievements are part of the Xbox backend, and don't just exist within the game itself. That means it's likely Microsoft directly intervened on the dev's behalf to get this achievement fixed.
There are plenty of other unobtainable Xbox achievements. Some are online multiplayer goals that are no longer obtainable due to server shutdowns. Some, like the one in Homestead Arcana, were never obtainable in the first place due to bugs and glitches. With that in mind, it seems that plenty of achievement hunters are hoping to see similar action taken on other unobtainables.
"Oh wow," KJer25 says, "I wish they would do this with all unobtainables no matter if they have gamerscore attached to them or not!"
"I'd like to see MS do this with other games that have unobtainable achievements - tell devs they have to fix it soon or have the achievement forcibly removed," Mike Marcelais says.
"A huge W for MS," Konquerer Don adds. "Let's hope they will purge the other unobtainable achievements too."
Get into some inexpensive achievement hunting with the best games on Game Pass.
