Moving your Animal Crossing: New Horizons island will be easy

Animal Crossing: New Horizons only let you have one island per Switch, and you couldn’t easily back it up to the cloud. It was also a pain to transfer it between consoles when upgrading, requiring you to deal with an entirely separate smartphone app. Not so with Switch 2. System transfers have been streamlined for the new hardware, including when going from Switch 1 to Switch 2.

“When you do the system transfer, everything like save data will remain on the Nintendo Switch and once it moves to the Nintendo Switch 2 as well,” hardware director Takuhiro Dohta told Polygon. The transfer will include players’ islands. “But the [Animal Crossing] island will be an actual move. So it will leave Nintendo Switch and move over to Nintendo Switch 2,” he added. Millions of players with hundreds of hours cultivating their Animal Crossing retreat can breathe a collective sigh of relief. – EG