Time Traveling back to before a village moved in.

[GreySkies]

I recently time traveled to mid December in my main town so I could move out a villager and move in Erik from my other town. My plan was to go straight back to where I had been playing after Erik moved in but ran into a problem.

Every time I sent him a letter he would reply as if it was the first letter I ever sent him. It was only solved by going past his original move in date.

I'm bummed out because this has really messed with my enjoyment of December and Toy Day. But Erik is my favourite villager so I don't want to mess with my friendship with him.

Has anyone ever experienced this before? Or have I done something wrong/run into a glitch?

 

[DerYamu]

I have never experienced something like this before, but I would guess what happens is the following: There is a function in the code of the game which has the purpose of deciding what a villager answers to one of your letters. While doing many things it also checks, whether that villager has sent you any letters in the past. If so, it picks a random answer (semi-random, because an attached gift influences the answer). If not so, the "first letter reply" is sent to you. A problem would occur, if the date of your game is set to a date before the villager's move in date. That is because the function will only check for letters after the move in date (checking for letters before that date would not make sense and only waste processing power, because when playing "legitimately" there can't be any letters from before that date). So the amount of letters the function can find is always 0 for as long as the date of your game is not ahead of the move in date of the villager and because of that it will always send the "first letter reply".
(Another reason could be, that letters from a villager to you are not even saved before the original move in date of the villager or deleted immediately, but the result would be the same.)

For a solution: If I understand your problem correctly, doesn't that mean that the bug/glitch will only occur until his original move in date and be solved after then anyway? So that you would just have to "deal with it" until then and after that you will be able to send him letters and he will reply correctly?

 

[GreySkies]

Thanks for your reply. That explanation definitely makes sense. Unfortunate though. I guess I will just go back and deal with it until I pass his move in date. I do wonder how the friendship will be affected without sending him letters.