Animal Crossing: New Horizons – How to Time Travel

The most unique thing about the Animal Crossing series is its reliance on a true calendar and clock. When it’s March 19th in the real world, it’s March 19th in the game itself. Of couse, while this has been true since the original game on Gamecube, there have also always been ways to time travel. With this latest entry on the Switch players are asking the question, can you time travel? The answer is yes, but be very wary as there can be consequences. With that said, here’s how to time travel in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

How to Time Travel

Again, I want to warn that there can often be consequences for time traveling starting at weeds growing everywhere and extending to ruined events or other things of that nature. You shouldn’t do it often, or at all if it can be avoided. So now that you are fairly warned here’s how to do it.

It’s as simple as saving your game, hitting Home, pressing X on Animal Crossing: New Horizons and closing the game down. Then head into settings, scroll down to System and choose Date and Time. Set it to whatever you want then load back into the game to be playing on that day and time.

However, one big thing has been changed with Animal Crossing: New Horizons. All those holiday events and other timed items are going to be downloaded as updates rather than already a part of the game. In previous entries you could jump to Christmas to experience the holiday festivities, but no longer. Now you can still get to the day but the event won’t be there, and there’s no telling what long term consequences that could cause for your game.

So while you can time travel, and we’ve shown you how to time travel in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, we would not recommend it unless you missed something or otherwise couldn’t experience that day’s events.