Considering getting back to New Leaf...who will remain?

[bekerteli]

Short story short: I miss NL and want to visit my old town...now, the last time I played was 2014, and the information I find about villagers moving over time varies. Some say you can o 192.168.0.1 nly lose one villager between saves, others that all the neighbours will be replaced. Which one is true?

I guess I could change the date on my 3ds, but wouldn't that count as timetraveling and face the same problems?

I used to knew these things but...it's been a long time.

 

[Introspective Onlooker]

That's quite a long time... I'm not familiar with villagers moving myself, since none of my villagers ever moved, but that's because I've been playing NL everyday since July 29th of 2021.

If the 3DS you played eight years ago is the same one you have now, you shouldn't worry about the date, because the game's time is in-sych with the system's clock.

 

[michito]

I don't have experience with such a long time, but in my 2-year hiatus only 1 villager moved out. Villager move ins/out and other daily events happens when you load your character, so if you really dont want to risk losing villagers you can set your game's time to the last day you played and work your way time-travelling day to day to the current date. If you decide to do this, empty your pockets and bells and walk in front of each one of your villagers to make sure they dont want to move out daily (they will ping you when they see you to tell they want to move out)
Still, I think it's not worth that trouble and I'm pretty sure you wont lose more than 1 (or 2 villagers as much) because the game counts that time you haven't played as one single really big leap of time, not as lots of different days/game loads (which is how the game decides when the villager is gonna move out), so I would just start playing normally in our current date.

(Also another option you got if a villager you really like moved out is to look up for someone with homebrew who can easily put that villager on their town & then give it to you when they're in boxes)

 

[Elias_]

From my experience, it's only one villager that moves out. I've started playing a couple of months ago and before that, I didn't touch the game in a few years. From what I remember, it was one or two villagers that moved out. It's probably safe to just keep playing normally.

If you still remember when you last played the game (even if it's just the month), you could set that date in your system settings of your 3DS. However, I'm not sure if this is actually beneficial.