Lately I've been making a ton of progress on my island but unfortunately with that also came a couple areas in my game that started suffering from performance issues. I've done a lot of searching around and it doesn't seem like anyone has a definitive answer on this despite the game being out so long. I'm honestly really surprised big Animal Crossing content creators aren't talking about it since it seems to be such a common problem. I've seen people mention waterfalls being the cause, while other people say it's too many flowers, but I think the closest answer I got was the custom simple panels/signs. Has anyone messed around with this enough where they feel like they have a good idea what is causing the frame drops on their island? Is it something that happens when your whole island starts to have too many items or just certain areas?
There is no definitive answer because not everyone will have the same type of things on their islands but everything that you mentioned will cause slow down once you start having too many of them. It doesnt matter whether its waterfalls, flowers, or simple panels. The game starts slowing down because of the amount of items the game has to render on the screen. Unfortunately, the only solution is to start taking out some items.
It is really difficult to pinpoint the cause. But it's best to just avoid having tons of items clustered in a given space.
As long as there's an absurd amount of objects (plants, furniture, custom designs, etc) that the game needs to load on the screen, you will continue to get frame rate drops.
Something called memory leak can happen if you leave your switch in sleep mode rather than turning it off entirely. If you're not already doing that, I'd say to give it a try.
The cause is simply the amount of stuff it needs to load up. When you're not in the area, the game doesn't render the objects but when you get closer to it, the game starts to. This is what causes the drops.
If you notice it in a certain area and it's bothering you, you will just need to remove some things and it will fix it.
Its pretty annoying I agree. I have one part of my island where it gets kinda bad in certain weather conditions
I find that I have the most drops when I have an area that is super cluttered, but also has heavy use of custom design paths or other elements. Other areas of my island are very cluttered with items but don't have FR drops regularly. But these heavy custom design areas almost always have them. I'd try looking at both clutter and custom designs as the possible culprit.
Also, during different events the addition of stuff in the plaza, etc has caused FR dropping where I'd otherwise not have that so be aware of that too! I'm not sure if different seasons impact this like the cherry blossom petals or autumn leaves and stuff like that. That may also be worth a look into!
