Can You Swim & Dive in Animal Crossing New Horizons
Governed by their experiences with some of the previous games, a lot of players are wondering if you can swim or dive in Animal Crossing New Horizons. There are various bodies of water on your randomly generated island – rivers, streams and ponds – and all of them are obstacles standing in the way of comfortable island traversal. There is a way to cross them without building bridges or going the long way around, thankfully. This guide will explain how exaclty, and answer the question of whether you can swim or dive in Animal Crossing New Horizons.
Is swimming possible in Animal Crossing New Horizons?
UPDATE (July 2020): Yes it is! Thanks to the free summer update released on July 3rd, you can now swim and dive in Animal Crossing New Horizons. Simply get a wet suit and jump into the ocean. For more info and tips, visit our guide on how to swim & dive in ACNH.
Original text (March 2020): In short, no. You can neither swim nor dive in Animal Crossing New Horizons. You can’t even enter water in any meaningful way. People coming from New Leaf were used to this feature and may end up grumpy because of its exclusion here, but thankfully, there are other way of crossing the vast number of wet surfaces. As we’ve mentioned, there’s always the possibility of building bridges, but that comes pretty late and besides, you can’t take bridges with you or move them around.
Having one point where you can cross a river is vastly inferior to having a portable river-crossing device. There is such a thing in New Horizons, and it’s called the Vaulting Pole. As the name suggests, it’s a long wooden pole that you can use to propel yourself across rivers. Best of all, unlike most other tools, it doesn’t break. You won’t have to worry about durability and such – once you’ve made it, it’ll stay with you till the end of days.
It hardly replaces the quiet joy of diving and marveling at subaquatic wildlife, but you can’t have everything in life, can you now?
