During our visit at Gamescom 2026, I was invited to check out the new The Keepsake Sea DLC for Disney Dreamlight Valley. I was super hyped and immediately booked an appointment. I’ve been a huge Disney fan ever since I was a little boy. And even now, I still dream of staying at the Disneyland Resort in California one day, walking into Disneyland Park and just taking a relaxed stroll through New Orleans Square. The atmosphere, the music and the whole look and feel of that area alone seem absolutely amazing to experience in real life someday.
I’ve pretty much always been a massive Disney Dreamlight Valley fan. I jumped into the game right at the Early Access launch, back then through Game Pass, and I was basically sold straight away. Normally, during that period you had to buy a Founder’s Pack to get access to the game, but with Game Pass you could start playing from day one.
A Founder’s Pack also gave you a few extras on top of access to the game, such as clothing, furniture and Moonstones. I just played through Game Pass and was basically an instant fan. Although I have to admit I’ve always been a huge Disney fan anyway, so in that sense this game was always going to win me over pretty quickly.
A quick little refresher
For anyone who could use a quick refresher: Disney Dreamlight Valley is a mix of a life sim and an adventure game where you live alongside familiar Disney and Pixar characters, complete quests and shape your own Valley exactly the way you want. What I especially love is that you can really customise the Valley entirely to your own taste.
You can move houses, redesign areas, place furniture and, of course, fully decorate your own home. You can even turn a simple village into your own little slice of a Disney park, for example. It feels incredibly nostalgic and is just plain cool!
Along the way, you keep unlocking new areas and Disney characters, so there’s pretty much always something new to do. It’s not really a game where you race from point A to the ending; it’s one you can play at your own pace, constantly dipping into something different. I also always end up wanting to rewatch the movies whenever I have to do quests for certain villagers.
That was enough for me for a while
I stopped playing around the time Stitch crash-landed his spaceship on Dazzle Beach. That was basically the point where I put the game aside for a while. Honestly, it was because at some point my body started screaming for fresh dopamine hits. I’d had a huge amount of fun with the game, but eventually I’d just had my fill for a bit. And wow, does The Keepsake Sea deliver a whole lot of fresh dopamine hits!
The Keepsake Sea pulls me back in
This DLC is the reason I’m ready to properly dive back into Disney Dreamlight Valley. The Keepsake Sea is the game’s fourth paid expansion and is set to launch in November 2026. At the time of writing, an exact release date has not yet been announced. This time, you can transform into a mermaid-like form and swim both above and below the surface. There are also three new island biomes to explore. So far, Shipwreck Shores is the only one we know by name: an area with a clear pirate vibe, shipwrecks, docks and a mysterious fort. And as if that wasn’t enough, you also get your very own pirate ship.
Finally, your own pirate ship
That pirate ship alone is already one of those additions that makes me think: yep, hand it over. According to the information shared during the presentations, you can sail between the islands with the ship and customise it too. Think different looks, sails and even your own pirate flag. Inside, there’s also a captain’s cabin you can decorate yourself, a bit like a smaller version of your own house. You can also take two Villagers with you as crew. If I understood the presentation correctly, one of them can even get a spot high up in the mast. As far as I can find, that last part hasn’t been officially described that way yet, so for now I’d mainly treat it as something that appeared to be shown during the demo.
There’s also a new salvaging minigame. At the back of your ship is a crane you can use at special spots to haul materials out of the sea. You can then use those materials to craft new furniture, among other things. And who’s going to be your favourite character from this DLC? Milo Thatch from Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Megara from Hercules and, of course, Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean have all been confirmed as new characters. And that last one, in particular, is obviously a perfect fit for the whole pirate theme.
No more hassle with fishing
One of the changes I might actually be happiest about is fishing. Before this DLC, you still had to pull out your rod every single time and wait until you’d reeled the fish in. In The Keepsake Sea, it’s going to be a lot easier. With your mermaid tail, you can simply swim over to a fishing spot and grab the fish straight away with the new trawl action. No more waiting around for a bite: just jump into the water, swim over and pick it up. And honestly, that sounds so much better to me, especially because fishing in Dreamlight Valley could sometimes take quite a bit of time. The nice thing is that, according to the developers, this new form won’t be limited to The Keepsake Sea either. You’ll also be able to explore the waters of your existing Dreamlight Valley in this form. So you can take advantage of this new way of fishing there too.
Going all out underwater
The underwater section in particular caught my attention straight away. You can customise your new form in quite a bit of detail, with different tails, ears, colours, patterns and other parts. Some tails even come with their own way of moving.
And thankfully, you won’t have to keep one eye on an oxygen meter while swimming either. There’s no timer forcing you to head back to the surface again and again. You can just swim around at your own pace and discover everything there is to find underwater. Exactly how I’d want it in a game like Dreamlight Valley.
But what I might be even more excited about is the decorating.
You can fully decorate the underwater areas yourself and even place your own house underwater. For the first time, decorating also gets a bit more verticality. You can place objects and platforms not just next to each other, but above and below each other too. And it looks seriously cool! I can already see myself spending way too long building an entire underwater world when all I meant to do was quickly knock out one quest.
Plenty of reasons to come back
After spending a long time away from Disney Dreamlight Valley, The Keepsake Sea almost feels like a completely new introduction to the game for me. Except this time, I’m not coming in as someone just starting their first adventure, but as someone who once had an incredible amount of fun in this Valley and is mostly very curious to see how much has changed over the years.
Swimming, building my own underwater world, grabbing fish without the hassle and then sailing around on my own pirate ship with Captain Jack Sparrow… Yep, those are pretty much exactly the dopamine hits I needed to get excited about Disney Dreamlight Valley again. The Keepsake Sea is set to launch in November 2026. At the time of writing, an exact release date and official price have not yet been announced. Both Steam and Xbox do state that the expansion includes 5,000 Moonstones.
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