Animal Crossing: New Horizons Already Works on PC Through Ryujinx Emulator

Mar 24, 2020 at 09:30am EDT
New Horizons

Animal Crossing: New Horizons may be the hottest game among those recently released, and that's saying something given that the list includes heavyweights such as DOOM Eternal and Half-Life: Alyx. Early UK sales data mark this as the fastest-selling Nintendo Switch game to date, with the exception of Pokémon Sword and Shield lumped together. It also already surpassed the combined sales of all previous Animal Crossing installments.

Our own Dave Aubrey rated New Horizons 9.4/10 in the review.

Related Story Animal Crossing New Horizons Collaboration Between Dell and Intel Brings eWaste Education and Neat Items

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the biggest reinvention of the series' mechanics and core gameplay loop, and that also makes it the best entry yet. This is a completely new kind of Animal Crossing experience while retaining everything you loved about the previous games. You'll spend hours catching fish and bugs, making money to pay off your loan, and do it while having more power over how you customise your experience than ever before. I adore Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and this is quickly becoming one of my most-played games on Nintendo Switch. If you've ever had a love slow-paced social sims like Animal Crossing or The Sims, this game is essential.

While the game is a Nintendo Switch exclusive, it is already playable on PC too thanks to the emulator Ryujinx. You may freely download the Preview Build, which supports both version 1.0.0 and 1.1.0 of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, on Ryujinx's Patreon.

The emulation performance and quality are pretty good, save for minor graphical glitches such as grass having the wrong color and a few missing lighting effects. There is however a bug where the introduction may crash the emulator; the current workaround is to skip the introduction by using a save file, as detailed below.

How to install a save file?

To install a save file, you first need the save file itself! For Animal Crossing: New Horizons, it can be downloaded in this post as an attachment.

Once it is downloaded, open Ryujinx and if you don't see the game in the game list, do the following steps:

Go to Options -> Settings, and click on Browse... at the bottom.

Select where your Animal Crossing: New Horizons XCI or NSP is stored on your computer, and click Save at the bottom-right.

Once that is done, the game should show up in the game list. If it doesn't, then verify that you have selected the proper folder.

Right click the game in the game list, and click on Open Device Save Directory:

It will open the location of the save file that Ryujinx is going to use for New Horizons.

After that, simply drag & drop the save file downloaded previously in that folder, and overwrite any file if it asks you to.

Voilà, you have successfully imported a save file in Ryujinx!

About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.