Animal Crossing follows a schedule based on the real world. Holidays happen on your island on the day they happen in real life, Sundays line up with our own so we know exactly when to buy turnips, and the day-and-night cycle matches our individual timezone. Everything is tailored to the real world. It has its merits, ensuring we make the most of each day in-game and know what to plan for, but it can be tedious.

Getting stuck in for the first time doesn’t last long. You quickly run up against a wall - waiting. Once you’ve exhausted the little you can do in the early days of the game, there’s no way to progress meaningfully since you have to wait for projects to wrap up. That happens in real time, so it’s a crawl to see improvements to the museum, shop, and your home.

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Most people turn off the game and go do something else, ready to return tomorrow. But as I’m sure many can relate to, I didn’t always have time for the next day. When New Horizons launched, I was enrolled at university, which meant some nights were spent with friends, others working on my dissertation, and the rest at my part-time jobs, while my days would be for lectures, seminars, and the student paper. I left uni and got a job, and even with regular working hours the one-to-one chronology of Animal Crossing left me hitting roadblocks.

So, like many, I time travelled. You can fiddle with your Switch’s internal clock to trick the game into thinking days have passed, skipping the wait for projects to finish. It also means you can reach Animal Crossing’s endgame much faster than the dawdling pace of playing it day by day. But because it’s unofficial and considered a ‘cheat’, it comes with some unfortunate side effects.

You can spoil turnips by mistake, reach holidays sooner than intended, or fall completely out of sync with the season. It’s messy leaping forward in time, but making it an official option would reduce the risk.

Time travel right now is a way to literally travel through time as far as the game is concerned, you’re making it think you’ve shot into the future. The best of both worlds would be an opt-in mode that lets you sleep away the day and move onto the next, still staying in sync with the real world but moving projects along. That way, you can build bridges, improve your home, renovate the museum, see new people appear on your island, replenish materials, and all the other exciting developments that you typically have to sleep between while still enjoying Halloween on Halloween.

While some use it to complete projects and replenish their islands so that they can keep playing, there are those that cherry-pick events and seasons to get what they want whenever. It rips away the game’s charm, that connectivity between a community even when isolated on your own island. We’re all seeing the same thing even though we’re not doing it together, but time travelling changes that. By integrating it as a mechanic, you can keep that schedule that brings everyone together while removing the tedium of waiting. It’s the best of both worlds.

I get it, Animal Crossing is aimed at kids, but plenty of adults play it too and adulthood is a busy ol’ time. Setting things in motion just to miss out on them for a week is disappointing, and frankly put me off the game. I’ve never been that invested because it was so demanding trying to keep up, with no other option but to ‘cheat’ in a method frowned upon by a sect of the community. Making it official is to make the game more approachable, and if you don’t like it? Well, don’t use it.

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Survival Week

Sponsored by Nightingale Dates February 12-18, 2024 Genre Survival, Survival Horror Franchise Minecraft Games Nightingale, Enshrouded, Palworld, DayZ, Valheim, ARK: Survival Evolved, Frostpunk, Pacific Drive, STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Project Zomboid

Welcome to the home of TheGamer's Survival Week, a celebration of all things, well, survival. Here you'll find features, interviews, and more dedicated to this popular genre, brought to you by Inflexion Games' upcoming open-world survival crafter, Nightingale.

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