Animal Crossing: New Horizons Will Use Cloud Backups, But Under Very Specific Circumstances

When Animal Crossing: New Horizons launches next month, it won't support backing up your saves to the cloud. Although this feature will actually be added to the game at some point after launch, you'll only be able to use it in two specific circumstances.

These circumstances are if you either lose your Nintendo Switch, or if your console gets damaged. Only under these circumstances will Nintendo allow you to use the cloud save feature with Animal Crossing: New Horizons, to retrieve your old save data for your new Switch, should you replace the damaged or lost console.

There's currently no projected date for this feature being available after the launch of New Horizons. According to Vooks.net, who translated Nintendo's post about the feature through their Japanese website, the feature will be available to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers only.

Previously, we reported that Nintendo wasn't allowing cloud saves with Animal Crossing: New Horizons, in order to avoid time manipulation with the game. If you could access saves from the cloud whenever you wanted, it'd be easy to manipulate the in-game time to your choosing, after all.

For now though, we'll have to wait and see when Nintendo chooses to launch the cloud backup feature for their game. Animal Crossing: New Horizons launches for the Nintendo Switch on March 20, and you'll only have one allocated island to live on per console, irrespective of how many users are playing the game on that console. Things could get a little cramped.