How not to migrate Animal Crossing island data
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Home sweet home
I’ve just got a new Nintendo Switch. I’m in the process of selling a bunch of stuff from the loft that I don’t need any more and I reckoned I could raise the price of a new OLED one. I got it today and it is lovely. The screen is really impressive.
Moving your settings from one Switch to another turned out to be one part smooth process and one part white-knuckle terror ride. It started well enough. Once the new switch was online I was able to authenticate using the phone and I was asked if I wanted to copy all the saved games and settings from one device to another. “Yes please” I replied and progress bars grew and shank. At the end of it I was asked if I wanted to delete my Nintendo identity from the old device. I said yes, because it is going on sale to pay for the new one. Feeling rather smug at how well that had all gone I then loaded Animal Crossing into the new device and opened up my little island.
It wasn’t there.
And I’d just disconnected myself from the old device. I really thought I’d lost everything I’d built up over hundreds of hours of gameplay. I didn’t know (although I should really have worked out) that Animal Crossing saved games are managed outside of normal game saves. So my island was still on my original old Switch. But could I get back to it? It turns out that I could. I re-registered myself on the old Switch, opened up Animal Crossing and was then given a chance to claim my island data which had been left lying around on the device - presumably to deal with situations like these. I was then able to use the Island Transfer tool to move the island from my old Switch to my new one, and that worked a treat. I can now wander around picking up weeds in splendidly sharp colour.
The takeaway from this is to use the Animal Crossing transfer tool if you are moving your island from one device to another, don’t expect the device transfer process to do it for you. I’m impressed that you can recover from the situation; but I’m rather annoyed that I had to do it in the first place. If at any point I’d accepted the offer to make a new island I dread to think what would have happened. I’d have lost the lot. A prospect that felt a lot more scary than it probably should be, what with nothing particularly real being involved. I really hated the idea of losing all the digital chums that I’ve made over the years, to say nothing of all the digital loot that I’d accumulated.
