Animal Crossing: New Horizons datamine reveals inner workings of Redd’s shop

As part of an update towards the end of April, Redd was added to Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The character shows up on a boat, and players can purchase rare items and works of art from Jolly Redd’s Treasure Trawler.

The thing about Redd’s shop is that both fake and real art are up for grabs. But how exactly does the game determine what will appear in-game? New information from reliable dataminer Ninji reveals the inner workings.

Redd’s ship displays a total of six items. There are four art pieces (slots 1-4) along with two “rare” furniture items (slots 5-6). The art can appear as follows:

– 10% – 1 fake, 3 real
– 30% – 2 fake, 2 real
– 50% – 3 fake, 1 real
– 10% – 4 fake, 0 real

And here are some additional details about how the whole thing works:

– Slots 1 and 2 can have paintings while slots 3 and 4 can have paintings and sculptures
– Slots 2 and 3 will always be a small (1×1) item
– Slots 1 and 4 can be any size
– For each real slot, there’s a 20% chance that the game will guarantee you an item you haven’t already donated to the museum
– The furniture in slots 5-6 is randomly selected from the ShopDefault, ShopMiscGoods and ShopLv1 groups (and ShopLv2 and ShopLargeGoods if you have the upgraded Nook’s Cranny)
– Slot 5 will only have 1×1 furniture items, while slot 6 can have 1×1, 2×1 or 2×2 furniture items
– It only picks items that have multiple color variants, and it will pick a random variant that’s not native to your island
– The 20%/80% for real art does not mean that 4/5 will be repeats
– It puts all possible items into a list and picks one randomly with equal weighting
– 20% of the time, donated items are excluded from consideration
– The other 80% of the time, the item you get may be new or it may be one you’ve already donated
– This makes it less likely that the random number generator will give you constant repeats when your museum is almost complete