
I went up to each and every character and said hi. When I walked through the grounds of Koga Island that morning, I was thrilled to see even the villagers that annoyed me during normal circumstances. I started New Horizons up again, and the game told me that it couldn’t find the user that the save file was attached to - but did I want to keep playing as that character? I just couldn’t see it unless I also had my game back in the system.

My account! Apparently, my profile was hiding inside my old Switch that entire time. What would happen if I just put my game back in my old Switch? To my surprise, and despite the fact that the profile wasn’t actually viewable on the console under normal circumstances anymore, a familiar icon suddenly popped up. The next morning, it dawned on me that I hadn’t tried one more thing thanks to the miasma of terror that enveloped the whole experience. How fast could I blitz through it all? How long would it take me to get back to where I was?Īnimal Crossing villagers have started talking about missing features It helped for me to think about it as a speedrun, not me trying to make the best out of a seemingly awful situation. Then it was going through all the introductory motions again - setting up camp, learning to craft, and so on. I settled on a deer and a peacock, which in my hundreds of hours of Animal Crossing time, I’d somehow never played with before.

And so the night went on, with me flying to a new island over and over, trying to find the perfect combination of animals that I could grow to love. This time, I thought, I’d just restart my game until I got a pair of good villagers. Laughing, and a little bit hardened by the experience, I resolved to just start over. I started tearing up, until I thought about trying to explain this entire situation to my therapist without sounding unhinged about why I cared so deeply about some digital animals. As far as I could tell, they seemed to be right - my new Switch Lite had nothing, my old Switch had nothing. I was told by strangers that yes, my island was gone. This was my first mistake, though I didn’t know it at the time. In a fit of desperation, I turned to Twitter and asked folks if I had unknowingly just deleted my entire island from existence by overwriting my SD card. Given that I didn’t want to use my docked Switch as my primary, this didn’t seem like a solution. I tried redownloading my profile information to my old Switch, but the console told me that once I did this, the profile would be tied to the Switch. I started up New Horizons once more, only to once again be greeted by Timmy and Tommy Nook. Thinking I had no reason to go back to the old console, I said yes. The Lite told me that SD cards were formatted for single-use, and that if I wanted to have it as my storage on the system, I needed to delete the previous console’s information. So, I brought over my card to my Lite.Īnimal Crossing fans are hiring turnip bouncers now

I wondered where, exactly, my island was stored - then I remembered that I had kept my SD card slotted in my original Switch. I was confused - where was my old island? I went back to my other Switch and found nothing there. Once preparations were complete, I popped in my copy of New Horizons into my new console, only to find that the game was welcoming me to a new island adventure. Might as well bring over my save data too. Once I ported things over, my docked Switch wouldn’t have my user profile anymore.
#Animal crossing switch used portable#
The first thing I did upon opening my neon yellow portable was to move over my user info, which my original Switch warned me would be a one-way street. One thing I had heard from friends over and over again was that the two-Switch experience was a headache of title permissions and other unforeseen annoyances, so I resolved to just make my new Switch Lite the primary console.
#Animal crossing switch used upgrade#
A good excuse, I thought, to upgrade to a Switch Lite. I’d been playing Animal Crossing nonstop, to the degree that it was starting to become a strain on my hands.

95 hours of playtime seemed to be gone - my island vanished into thin air. For a stretch of about 12 hours, I lived an Animal Crossing: New Horizons nightmare.
