How To Make Villagers Leave Your Island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

This guide should help make villagers you do not like to leave your island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Before going any further, this guide requires time traveling in the game. If you’re not comfortable with doing this, you might have to wait it out.

Methods that do not work:

• Hitting villagers with bug nets.
• Reporting villagers to Isabelle at the Town Hall.
• Annoying villagers by constantly talking to them within a short timeframe.

The method that works without time traveling:

Amiibo cards force villagers out, however, they are not the most reliable because the villager from the card will move in. This guide aims at forcing villagers to leave so that an empty plot of land is left behind.

How To Make Villagers Leave Your Island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Pre-requirements:

Make sure that you have been talking to the villagers you want to keep at least 2-3 times a day before using this method. It’s not an absolute requirement, but it’s recommended for a better chance to trigger the thought bubble on the villager you want to kick out.

Follow the instructions below:

1. Load Animal Crossing: New Horizons, save, and exit.
2. Using the console’s clock, change your time to 1 month and 1 day into the future. Load the game, save, and close.
3. Set the clock back 1 month. Open the game, save, and close again.
4. Go forward one day again by tweaking the clock. Open the game and search for the villager you want to leave and check if the bubble has been triggered before autosave. If the villager does not have a bubble, quit the game without saving.
5. Repeat step #4 until the villager wants to leave.

After triggering the thought bubble on a villager you want to leave, save the game, and quit. Change the clock back if you wish and wait until they fully move out. They should take 2 days to fully move out (first is when they’re in “boxes”). You can time travel again to speed the process up.

Important notes

• The plaza or near the villager’s house is where you’d likely find them. Villagers are more likely to be outside at 12 PM – 3 PM, so you should set your time appropriately.
• Make sure you’ve spoken to the villager you’re targeting at least once. They will not ask to leave if you’ve never spoken to them since they moved in.
• The last villager you have recruited to your island will not trigger the bubble (or it’s less likely to happen from the writer’s experience of testing the method).
• Villagers do not ask to leave if they’re in a building, therefore do not bother entering buildings to search for them.

Are there any risks to using this method?

Time-traveling far ahead in the game will result in a cockroach infestation in your house. You will have to search each room in your house and mash them until they’re all gone. Going back in time will spoil your turnips. Your mailbox will also get clogged with mail.

You will not lose any of your favorite villagers during this process, as seen in New Leaf.