How to Time Travel in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Why would you want to utilise Animal Crossing time travel? Because of New Horizons running in real-time to the date and time set on your Nintendo Switch, you have to wait extra days for certain in-game developments. For example, when you have a new neighbour move onto the island, you’re not even able to interact with them until the next day as they’ll be busy unpacking. Or when Blathers, the island’s museum curator, is converting his tent into the fully-built museum, you’re unable to donate any fossils or creatures until the renovations are complete. If your impatience has become too much to bear with each of these delays, the steps to skipping ahead in time are very simple.

Before doing so, however, need more help with the game? Be sure to check out our other Animal Crossing: New Horizons guides, including the Beginner’s Tool Guide, the Beginner’s Guide to Every Building and How to Get K.K. Slider.

Close the Animal Crossing: New Horizons software

First, after saving, you need to close the Animal Crossing: New Horizons software completely via the Nintendo Switch home menu. Then from said home menu, pop over to Date and Time under your System Settings. Notice the setting that says “Synchronise Clock via Internet“.

Nintendo Switch’s Date & Time setting

All you need to do now is turn that off, change the date and time to that of which you desire and you’re done! Boot up Animal Crossing: New Horizons again and you’ll see that the in-game date and time has no changed. If you moved a day forward, any renovations or home moves by new islanders are now fully complete.

This guide has spoke of only moving forward days at a time and it’s recommended you only do just that. Only time travel by one-to-two days at most. Skipping one day ahead is relatively harmless, but if you move forward too far, let’s say six months ahead, you’ll find your island in disarray. Fruit will have rotted, the land will be abundant in weeds and your island inhabitants will most likely be long gone!

You’ll also miss out on in-game events on certain dates, as these are implemented by Nintendo via the internet on said dates. Moving backwards by a day doesn’t seem to have any repercussions as does skipping forward. When moving backwards myself, there was no loss of progress of which I made from the future in-game calendar day.