Those early days of mystery in Animal Crossing: New Horizons are really something special. Setting out to a new island, meeting your first villagers, and helping Tom Nook build up the infrastructure, each new activity was a chance for fresh excitement, so why not relive those days once more, or even let someone else do the same? To do that you’ll need to learn how to reset Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Thankfully, the process is pretty simple and can be done in very little time at all.
How to reset Animal Crossing: New Horizons
© Nintendo
Whether you want to let someone else start a new island on your Switch, you’re not happy with your opening villagers, or you just want to start from the beginning, you’ll need to know how to reset Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Before you do so, however, it’s worth noting that this will entirely remove your current island and villager. You cannot recover it after resetting the game, so only do this if you are certain you want to start again.
Okay, so you’re certain? In that case, you can reset Animal Crossing: New Horizons from the Nintendo Switch home menu. Open the System Settings tab, then go to Data Management. In here, choose Delete Save Data from the bottom of the menu. Now you can choose Animal Crossing: New Horizons and confirm to wipe all stored data for the game. Here are those steps again for easy viewing:
- Select System Settings from the Switch home menu.
- Open Data Management.
- Scroll down to the Delete Save Data option at the bottom.
- Select Animal Crossing: New Horizons Save Data and confirm.
Again, it’s worth restating that this will completely remove both your characters and your island. If you launch the game after doing so, it’ll be like the title has never been played on your console before, and you’ll need to create everything from scratch. Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a very slow game to progress through, so think carefully before choosing to do this.
If you’re really, truly sure you want to reset Animal Crossing: New Horizons, then following the steps listed above will sort you out. Hopefully your next island adventure will prove more successful, so that you don’t have to wipe everything again!