You’ll be able to move your Animal Crossing island to the Switch 2 easily

Good news! If you’ve been fretting about abandoning your Animal Crossing: New Horizons island save on a console that will rot away in storage, then worry not. You’ll be able to seamlessly transfer your island save data to the Nintendo Switch 2, without needing to download an extra app or use a cloud save.

The Nintendo Switch 2 will have the option to do a complete system transfer from your original Switch, moving over everything in one process — including your beloved island. Nintendo confirmed this during an interview with Polygon last week.

“So I should clarify that when you do the system transfer, everything like save data will remain on the Nintendo Switch and once it moves to the Nintendo Switch 2 as well,” Programming Management Group Senior Director Takuhiro Dohta said. “But the [Animal Crossing] island will be an actual move. So it will leave Nintendo Switch and move over to Nintendo Switch 2.”

Before, there were technically two ways to move your island. You could save it to the cloud and then download it back (though this was more so for if you lose or broke your Switch) or you would need to download the “Animal Crossing: New Horizons Island Transfer Tool” app on your Switch to transfer it from one console to the other. The former cloud method would also require you to contact Nintendo to download the data, so. Not great.

While neither of these methods were horrendous, they just seemed a little convoluted to move save data. It’s kind of understandably so, as Nintendo doesn’t want you to have clones of your island across multiple devices and whatnot, but still! It’s nice to know that you won’t have to deal with any extra frills when it comes to keeping your island safe. While many of us (myself included) haven’t touched New Horizons in years, it’d be sad to lose all the hard work we put in.

That being said, you’ll need both your original Nintendo Switch and your Nintendo Switch 2 on hand to do this transfer, so if you’re trading your Switch to get a cheaper Switch 2, you’ll still need to use the cloud back-up, it seems. ☹