How To Time Travel In Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Animal Crossing: New Horizons operates on real world time, and you’ll often need to wait to unlock certain buildings, characters and materials. For those of us who just can’t wait, there’s a better solution — time travel.

This article has been updated since its original publication.

While time travel carries a great deal of reward, it’ll also cause major issues in the game. Here’s what you need to know about Animal Crossing‘s time travel function.

How do you time travel in Animal Crossing: New Horizons?

Time travelling in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is fairly simple. Because the game operates on a real world clock, all you’ll need to do is change the time on your Nintendo Switch console.

Here’s how to do it:

  • On the home screen, navigate to settings
  • Select ‘System’ from the dropdown menu
  • Select ‘Date and Time’ and choose the date you want to travel to

When you open Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you’ll wake up on your selected date.

What are the risks and rewards of time travel in Animal Crossing?

Time travelling in Animal Crossing lets you skip through the painful wait times of construction works and gain new features like terraforming faster. You’ll be able to breeze through the first few days of Animal Crossing: New Horizons‘ lengthy grind and get to work building your dream town.

You can even take advantage of the game’s banking system to gain millions of bells in interest — to do this, simply travel back in time (40+ years), deposit an amount in the bank and travel forward a few decades to claim your built up interest.

But for all its benefits, time travelling in New Horizons carries great risk particularly, when it comes to calendar events like Bunny Day, which runs from April 1-12.

To participate in events, your Nintendo Switch console connects to the internet and veries your console’s date. If the dates don’t match up, you won’t be able to participate — but changing them back should be no issue if you’ve time travelled and still want to take part.

While you can easily travel back to an event date with no consequences, note that your town will likely develop weed problems, any food left out will rot, cockroaches will invade your home and villagers will feel abandoned if you travel forward too far.

For the time poor, Animal Crossing‘s time travel function can be a godsend, but it also takes a lot of the fun and relaxation out of the game.

Should you choose to time travel, use your newfound power wisely.

[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/05/animal-crossing-new-horizons-five-star-town-guide/” thumb=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/animal-crossing-new-horizons-5-stars-410×231.jpg” title=”How To Get A Five Star Island In Animal Crossing: New Horizons” excerpt=”Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a fun and relaxing game, but there’s also a lot of hidden challenges you might not be aware of. If you speak to Isabelle at the Town Hall, you can ask for an island evaluation to get a score out of five. Most towns sit in the two to three star range — and you’ll have to put in work to earn the elusive five stars.”]


The Cheapest NBN 1000 Plans

Looking to bump up your internet connection and save a few bucks? Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Kotaku, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


4 responses to “How To Time Travel In Animal Crossing: New Horizons”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *