When Animal Crossing: New Horizons launched, it was met with nearly-universal praise. However, some aspects of prior Animal Crossing games fan had expected to see were noticeably missing, like The Roost, Brewster's cafe.
Luckily, most of these issues were addressed by Animal Crossing: New Horizon's development team, adding in several features that fans had requested with the game's final patch. However, at least one fan has encountered a glitch that took one of these additions away.
Redditor ysof_lucas took to the Animal Crossing subreddit to share their discovery and confusion. A simple screenshot shows their villager staring at the wall where the entrance to The Roost should be. Ysof_lucas confirmed that they had previously unlocked The Roost, and it was unexpectedly missing when they went to the museum.
Several commenters on the post seemed to be amused at the glitch, with claims that the pigeon had 'flown the coop,' perhaps due to the use of the bizarre pigeon milk in The Roost's coffee. Another made a Silent Hill 2 joke, quoting the classic cryptic line 'There was a hole here. It's gone now,' referring to the shop's missing entrance.
Ysof_lucas didn't share if they ever managed to get The Roost back. However, the leading theory is that something went wrong when the game asked to update. Ysof_lucas confirmed that nothing else seemed to be wrong with their island, and the only thing that had changed before booting up the title was agreeing to the update. Other users recommended uninstalling or archiving Animal Crossing: New Horizons and downloading it again, but it's unclear if that resolved the issue.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a pretty stable game, but it hasn't been without its issues before. Some of these have been update related, like when the deep sea diving update broke certain types of bridge landscaping on islands. Others seem to have been an issue with the game from early on, if not the start, like villager plots breaking and preventing anyone from moving in. In any case, this seems to be the only report of this being a problem, so it doesn't look like it's a widespread issue with the update.
The Roost was missing some functions that gamers had hoped for, like the ability to work for The Roost as one could in Animal Crossing: New Leaf. However, most would likely be alarmed to discover it missing entirely after going through the trouble of unlocking it. With any luck, a simple reinstall fixed this issue for Ysof_lucas and anyone else out there who may have encountered it.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available for the Nintendo Switch.