Last week Nintendo introduced a significant update to Animal Crossing: New Horizons that included the addition of an art gallery to Blathers’ museum as well as series mainstay Crazy Redd from whom works of art can be obtained. To some, this was unsurprising, as certain perceptive players had noticed in-game dialogue that seemed to imply that the art museum already existed. Their simple logic was that it would have been weird for Nintendo to include content referring to an art museum, something from past Animal Crossing games, and not eventually implement one. Now some newly-shared evidence points to another past Animal Crossing feature making its return.

This evidence was gathered by a dataminer named Ninji directly from the game’s code and seems to indicate the return of the Dream Suite from Animal Crossing: New Leaf, the prior mainline Animal Crossing game to New Horizons.

The Dream Suite’s primary function was to allow players to visit not other players’ villages but simulacra of them. Through Luna, the tapir proprietor of the building, players could upload a simulacrum of their own village, which, in terms of the conceit of the Dream Suite was a “dream” version of their village. That copy would then sit on Nintendo’s servers, and could be accessed either by friends with a code tied to that village, or randomly, through a feature that allowed visiting a random one of the many dream villages uploaded to Nintendo’s servers. Since it was a copy and not the village itself, it wasn’t updated unless players decided to update the stored version. It also didn’t require the player who created it to be online for others to visit.

Ninji first noticed a save file structure in version 1.0.0 of the game that included a field, “DreamID,” that appeared unused and populated with only zeroes. Patch 1.2.0 then included an actor with the title “ActorNetDreamLand,” as well as new, likely-related code that sends data to Nintendo’s servers, which would be required for uploading dream villages.

Currently visiting remote friends’ villages requires a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, so the Dream Suite could offer a stripped-down way to share villages without the need for an Online subscription. Or it could simply be the return of a unique feature to the series, further bolstering an already-historic game.

Source: Nintendo Life