Flatten? Restart? Feeling bummed, undone a lot of work!

[MartyFromCherryfall]

So I've had my island since a few months after the game came out, only island I have worked on, never time travelling either, so a lot of work collecting items and recipes. It started lagging REALLY bad. I've flattened the island before and had only decorated the 25% bottom right corner.

I don't use excessive amounts of items, nothing like what I see on Youtube or dream islands. The game slowed down so bad the text scrolled slowly across the screen and the animals voices actually came out slowed down.

I deleted all custom paths in the lagging area, then the in game paths underneath... then all the weeds... then the waterfall, then the normal water etc... until i've ruined my island and not sure I can be botheted to relay all the paths and water. And nope i didn't find what was causing the lag either.

Part of me wants to restart, but another part of me thinks it is too much work to gather the recipes etc again and I didn't find what was causing lag.

Advice? Help!

 

[Radiant Dreamer]

Is it still lagging? what's your system memory at? your sd card memory? are other games getting the same lag?

honestly i have to go through my switch memory every other month or so to delete stuff i don't play, and archive other titles. i've got a 256gb sd card and the vast majority of my collection is digital, so i had to do some serious pruning early this month just so i could download the update.

 

[Moonfish]

I recently had to restart, not by choice. It honestly stinks not having the recipes or catalog I had available anymore but I think unfixable lag is a good reason to start over. I’ve dreamed of lagging towns and it was miserable, I can’t imagine my own island acting like that.

I would exhaust all options first though, the poster above has some good ideas to look through first I think. I hope you get it fixed!

 

[MartyFromCherryfall]

I use a cartridge, but just realised everything on my switch is saving to the SD drive and not the console. I wonder if it would perform better on the console. I've never checked this before, assumed stuff would install on the console first. AC takes 4.5 gig on my SD drive. Ive 20g left on there and 25 on the console.

 

[MartyFromCherryfall]

Well I decided to flatten and am feeling really good about it now as I can't wait to redesign.

I also found out what was causing the lag. It is the area behind resident services... it doesn't lag when I move through the area itself, but it was causing the severe frame drops when it appeared in the distance in that hazy misty layer. At night you can only see a blue shape of it and it doesn't lag, but during the day when it is visible it was causing a problem.

It was trees, a wall, a cliff with a further wall with some waterfalls and statues in place of wall peices, so much lag the sound of the villager voices slowed down making them sound a bit drunk.

 

[Pokeking]

I have not restarted and do not plan to since I've put too much investment into the town I already got going. I also have no intentions of terraforming anymore or move around buildings. At this point, all I am ever going to do is change around decorations. For example, I recently put up a retro transportation stop near the entrance with a donation box next to it.