Key Takeaways
- Rainbow sightings in Animal Crossing are rare and exciting, even for long-time players.
- Players are still uncertain about what triggers rainbows in the game, but spotting one is very special, especially for a player who stumbled onto a rainbow after playing the game for 23 years.
One long-time Animal Crossing player who’s stuck with the series since its beginning has seen an in-game rainbow for the first time. While only a somewhat uncommon occurrence in the real world, Animal Crossing rainbows are much harder to track down, and finding one can be a coveted memory for players.
The series launched in 2001, and to date, it encompasses five mainline Animal Crossing games as well as a number of spin-offs, such as Happy Home Designer, Amiibo Festival, and the soon-to-be-discontinued Pocket Camp mobile game. Through all the mainline games, players have had the ability to find rainbows, but tracking them down is no easy task.
Reddit user cailincailinl recently posted an image of their lucky find in the original Nintendo GameCube version of the game, showing a pale, seven-colored rainbow arch reaching across one of the waterfalls in their Animal Crossing village. They began playing Animal Crossing at the age of 6 alongside their sister in 2001, and despite 23 years of experience, this summer was the first time they had seen an in-game waterfall on their own screen. Other players in the comments didn’t seem to know that in-game rainbows were anything more than a myth, including one who had already found one while playing an emulated version of the original GameCube title.
Animal Crossing Player Finds First Rainbow After 23 Years
Even more than two decades since the series launched, players are still trying to figure out what makes rainbows appear in Animal Crossing games. One commenter suggested that they appear at waterfalls on sunny mornings the day after a rainstorm, though their rarity indicates that this can’t be the only factor needed to spawn rainbows. Other players rely on the MeteoNook weather prediction tool for Animal Crossing games to try to pinpoint when rainbows and other events like meteor showers may occur. That same tool can also be used to help predict much more common weather, such as when it is going to rain, using predictable patterns the games tend to follow.
Tracking down rare weather events can provide a lot of excitement for Animal Crossing players, but the games offer up enough seemingly random content to provide surprising events at any given time. Just a few months ago, one Wild World player found a super rare item, the Master Sword from the Legend of Zelda franchise, as a gift from a villager just five minutes into starting a new playthrough.