Since the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, players across the world have been jumping back and forth in time to speed up progress on their island getaways. Buildings and roads are being constructed, trees and plants are growing in abundance, and museums are being filled to the brim with seasonal bugs and fish. But while everything may look nice on the surface, players have been taking notice of the pitfalls of their actions.
The Animal Crossing series as a whole has allowed for time travel to take place, but each game has introduced its own set of punishments for those looking to mess with their clocks. Most of these unfortunate events will also trigger if you have not played the game for a long time. However, these consequences have been seen more like a punishment to time travelers than those who put the game down for an extended period.
Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing for the Nintendo GameCube didn't have much to offer in terms of time traveling other than trees growing faster, shop items rotating and skipping to seasonal events. However, the punishments were in abundance from the series start. Weeds would sprout across their town and flowers would shrivel up and die. Any turnips players were planning to sell would also rot away.
Plants weren't the only side effects of time travel. A player's home would become infested with cockroaches, requiring the player to stomp them out. A player's mailbox would also fill up quickly if skipped too far into the future, having them miss any future mail. Villagers throughout the town would also feel neglected from not seeing their favorite neighbor, and may opt to live elsewhere.
Animal Crossing: Wild World
While Animal Crossing: Wild World brought a lot of great new features to the series, not much changed in terms of punishment to those seeking time travel. The only notable difference was some players experienced the inability to use the catalog in Tom Nook's Store, but this was due to the player's mailbox being full after time travel.
Animal Crossing: City Folk
Animal Crossing: City Folk had its fair share of new consequences, such as a potential downgrade of Tom Nook's Store. Due to the passing of time, Tom Nook wouldn't receive attention from the player, forcing him to downsize the store to a previous version. Bedhead was also introduced, where if a player didn't play for fifteen days in a row (or time traveled further than fifteen days) they would wake up having a unique, messy hairstyle. This hairstyle can be reversed by taking a visit to Shampoodle, but this would cost the player money to return to their previous hairstyle.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Animal Crossing: New Leaf and its punishments were similar to that of Wild World, with nothing substantial or new being introduced. Players would wake up with bedhead and cockroaches in their homes, along with unhappy villagers and rampant weeds growing in the town.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
The latest addition to the Animal Crossing series, New Horizons, actually alleviates a few of these consequences. Bedhead can still occur, but the player will simply fix their own hair at no cost. Weeds may still pop up around the island, but flowers will never die due to a lack of water or attention. Instead, they simply won't sprout flowers but will blossom again after being watered. Mailboxes will also no longer fill up, as the game will overwrite your oldest mail with your newest letters and packages. There are also significantly more slots for mail than previous entries had.
In actuality, the only real reason players have for time traveling in New Horizons, special events, is rendered entirely moot by changes in gaming technology. These events are no longer stored in the game's data and activated by an in-game calendar, but will now be distributed as downloadable content.
The only other new downfall to time travel in New Horizons would be the loss of your Nook Miles Streak. When you boot up the Nook Shop for the first time each day, you are awarded Nook Miles for your streak of using the system. Time travel will break this streak if skipping multiple days, but due to the max streak being seven days, it will only take a week to return the streak to its max.
Animal Crossing has continuously brought exciting new features into its titles across the years, while also making sure players stay within the bounds of which it is meant to be played. Most of these consequences occur if time traveling is taken too far forward or back, but in small amounts, players can still utilize a nifty trick to earn bells and progress their towns. Animal Crossing: New Horizons has fixed some of the time-traveling pain points, while still allowing players to have something to look forward to with its planned release of events.