Animal Crossing: New Horizons — How to Transfer Save Data

As part of today’s announcement of its next free update to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Nintendo revealed that it will finally facilitate save data transfer for the title. You might recall that there was a bit of a hubbub at release for the Nintendo Switch video game as it was revealed that islands were basically locked to the console and that even restoring a corrupted save or from a lost console was tricky. All of that is set to finally be resolved this week on Thursday, November 19th.

According to Nintendo’s official support page for transferring save data in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, there are two kinds of transfers: the entire island and just one character. The former is for use when you’re looking to move everything to a new Nintendo Switch system while the latter is for moving just the one resident. The exact method for how this is accomplished is expected to be added when the feature is live.

For those curious, the single-resident move includes the character, their home, and “most items” they have on them and in storage. The island representative — essentially the main character — cannot be transferred in this way. If there is no save data for the game on the new system, a new island will be made, but if there is already a save they will simply move to the already existing island.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is currently available for the Nintendo Switch. It continues to receive regular updates, with the most recent being the fact that mushrooms are now appearing around islands. As noted above, the next free update is set to release on Thursday, November 19th. You can check out all of our previous coverage of the Animal Crossing franchise right here.

Are you excited to finally be able to effectively transfer save data from the game? Have you still been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons? Let us know in the comments, or feel free to hit me up directly over on Twitter at @rollinbishop to talk about all things gaming!