Yes, You Can Time Travel And Change The Clock In Animal Crossing: New Horizons

4 years ago Justin 43 Comments

There’s been a lot of speculation and concern for months now around whether Animal Crossing: New Horizons still allows you to change the game’s real-time clock, mostly thanks to a French interview last year about cloud saves.

Now that the review embargo has passed and media have been able to share plenty of information on their experiences with the game, we can confirm that time traveling has returned in Animal Crossing: New Horizons and it’s certainly still possible to change the in-game clock.

A number of different reviewers have noted time traveling, but the IGN review for Animal Crossing: New Horizons is probably the best source as the author details how they personally time traveled ahead and exactly how she did so.

Notably, it seems that there isn’t actually any in-game clock change settings inside Animal Crossing: New Horizons or at least none of the reviews have mentioned one. What you’ll instead need to do is change the system clock of your entire Nintendo Switch system to the date and time of your choosing.

According to IGN, you can accomplish a system clock time change that works in New Horizons by following these simple steps below:

1. Complete your daily goals and talk to Tom Nook.
2. Save your game.
3. Enter the Switch System Settings menu and scroll down to System.
4. Choose Date and Time and turn Synchronize via Internet to OFF.
5. Click on Date and Time and set your clock to the following day.
6. Select Animal Crossing: New Horizons from the menu screen and hit X to close it.
7. Restart the game and you should be playing on your new day.

So while the process might be a little different than you are probably used to from the in-game clock option in past games like Animal Crossing: New Leaf, the ability to time travel is still very much alive and kicking in Animal Crossing: New Horizons! Nintendo definitely hasn’t taken the option away.

Of course, we expect that some of the usual consequences for time traveling will likely exist in the new game, although we can’t yet confirm. In past games, your Stalk Market turnips would spoil and a large amount of weeds could grow. Although weeds can be sold for Bells in New Horizons so…

Most importantly, it’s worth remembering that most of the usual holiday events that Animal Crossing is known for do not exist in New Horizons quite yet. Nintendo will be implementing these holidays with a series of future updates, but you can’t experience the Halloween event by time traveling yet for example.

So do you plan on making use of time travel in Animal Crossing: New Horizons? Or will you try and play the game day by day in real-time for as long as possible? Personally, I’ve always been a fan of playing by the real-time clock as I believe that’s a fundamental aspect of Animal Crossing since the beginning, so I try to avoid time traveling if I can.

Let me know what your thoughts on time traveling are in the comments though as I always love to hear about people’s opinions on the topic, regardless of which side you take! Thanks to NWR for the banner screenshot.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons launches worldwide on March 20th! Pre-order the game here, the official guide here, and check our release date countdown here. Stay tuned to Animal Crossing World for more news as we approach the release!

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