If you’re someone who’s wanting to ensure the longevity of your beautiful island home in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you might be needing to be super careful about how you treat your saved data. The word on the street is that Animal Crossing New Horizons lets you recover your save once, and just once. Reckon this might be a problem? Here’s what we know. 

Animal Crossing: New Horizons Lets You Recover Your Save Once

So, as you may have already heard, the rumor is that you’ll only get to recover your data once if you’re someone who’s cracked into Animal Crossing New Horizons. It’s been confirmed in the aftermath of the most recent Nintendo Direct that cloud saves will not be an option, and while disappointing, we reckon that a fair portion of the community was expecting it. 

How save files will work in Animal Crossing New Horizons is that they will be tied to your actual Switch console. Mhm, you read that right. You won’t be able to transfer your save to another console except via what seems to be an emergency service that will be provided to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers who own New Horizons, and this service to transfer your files to another console by backing the data up from the server will be something you can only utilize once. This feature will reportedly launch after the game’s been out for a bit, but it seems like a puzzling limitation.

What happens if someone’s Switch is borked? Consoles aren’t bulletproof, and an unfortunate accident that results in yours malfunctioning or you having to get a new one sounds like it might gate you from ever accessing any legacy town data if you’ve, well, already recovered your save once before. That hardly seems fair. However, the UK Nintendo site for Animal Crossing: New Horizons mentions that “a function specific to Animal Crossing: New Horizons to move users and save data to another console is planned for later this year” which sounds different from the one-time data recovery service being touted. Curiouser and curiouser! Hopefully this isn’t just a region-specific thing.

So now that you’re a little more clued in about whether or not Animal Crossing New Horizons lets you recover your save once, hopefully this hasn’t put too much of a dampener on your enthusiasm! We’re curious about what the other data transfer options are going to end up being, so when we figure that out we’ll definitely update our guides hub to keep you in the loop. Need a hand with anything else regarding Animal Crossing: New Horizons? Check out these other tips and tricks that we’ve put together: 

• How to Play Co-op in Animal Crossing: New Horizons 
• Starting Items in Animal Crossing: New Horizons 
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons Island Facilities Guide