Animal Crossing New Horizons gets the Island Transfer Tool
If you're one of those people who somehow got their New Horizons progression stuck on a broken or otherwise damaged Switch console, you're going to be a huge fan of the all-new Island Transfer Tool that just launched.
This exciting new tool is essentially a data transfer feature, but it goes way deeper than that. Island Transfer Tool offers three different save-state choices that range from character transfer all the way to comprehensive data backups. We won't take up too much of your time today, but we will offer a short breakdown of why this is very important in the long run.
How does the Island Transfer Tool work?
All things considered, the Island Transfer Tool has been a long time coming, and we've even referenced it a few times already in our Community section. The simple truth is that New Horizons lacked any sort of comprehensive backup option. If you ended up getting your Switch borked this way or the other, you were basically SOL. Thankfully, with ITT, this is no longer the case!
As we said, there are three major features available as part of the ITT suite:
- Entire Island Transfer
- Resident Move
- Island Backup and Restore.
Though these are probably pretty self-explanatory, we'll go into a bit more detail below.
Entire Island Transfer
"Use this feature if you wish to transfer the entire island and all residents to a new Nintendo Switch system," says the official pitch. Basically, what this does is that it moves everything over from one Switch console to the other. "The island, all progress and customizations, your animal neighbors, the island resident representative, and any other residents that have been created on the island will be transferred."
The downside, however, is that you do need to have access to both the original and the new Nintendo Switch for Entire Island Transfer to work. Not ideal, to be sure, but this isn't that big of a problem if you use the new Backup feature. We'll get to that, too.
Resident Move
"Use this feature if you wish to transfer just one resident to a new Nintendo Switch system," Nintendo explained. "The resident, the resident’s home, and most items held by the resident and kept in storage will be transferred to an island on the new Nintendo Switch system. The island resident representative cannot be transferred."
Now, this option is perfect for those who, say, started their Animal Crossing career on someone else's Switch console, and now they wish to move their progression over to their own. Very nice, and sure to be handy down the line.
Island Backup and Restore
This is the option we were really looking forward to the most. Simply enabling the Island Backup and Restore functionality on your baseline Switch will mean that you'll have access to everything on a potential replacement console. It's not even that you'll need to perpetually hit 'backup' after each progression milestone: "If you have enabled island backup, you will be able to restore the last saved version of your island and all residents on a replacement Nintendo Switch system."
A real game-changer, all in all. Kudos to Nintendo for launching such a comprehensive database safety app, even though it goes without saying that having it from the get-go would've been ideal.
How to turn on the Island Transfer Tool and New Horizons Backup feature?
The process of enabling the Island Transfer Tool and, obviously, the New Horizons Backup feature, is simple. You do, however, need to keep a few things in mind:
- use a Nintendo Account with an active Nintendo Switch Online membership
- use a Nintendo Account that has a resident on the island
- make sure that your Nintendo Switch console is connected to a stable Internet connection
- update Animal Crossing: New Horizons to version 1.4.0 or newer
- you can enable island backup only for one island resident at a time
If you tick all of those boxes, you can use the following procedure to enable backup for New Horizons:
- From the title screen, press the − Button to access the Settings menu
- Select Island backup, then Enable island backup
And you're good to go! Backups are made periodically whenever your Nintendo Switch is connected to the Internet, and while you're not actually playing games on it, so as not to interfere with your playing experience. Neat!