You can time travel in Pokémon Pokopia, jumping ahead to rush construction on buildings and materials, refresh your daily shop, or even experience timed events early. Outside of that, there isn’t too much reason to time travel, but I won’t judge you if you want to anyway.
Below we explain how to time travel in Pokémon Pokopia, as well as explain any effects it may have on your gameplay.
How to time travel in Pokémon Pokopia
To change the time in Pokopia, you’ll need to do the following:
- Go to your Nintendo Switch 2 system settings.
- Scroll down to “System.”
- Select “Date and Time.”
- Turn off the “Synchronize Clock Using the Internet” toggle, if that’s on.
- Select “Current Date and Time.”
- Set the date and time to whatever you want it to be.
The next time you open the game, it’ll be the next day, or whatever time you set it to. You don’t even have to fully close the game or return to the main menu for the time changes to take effect. When the date moves forward, you’ll be teleported back to your home (or the Pokémon Center, if you don’t have one). Buildings that you needed to wait until “tomorrow” to complete will be finished, vending machines will be restocked, your daily shop selection will change — the things that usually change upon daily reset will occur, as you’d expect them to.
You can even opt to time travel to access events early, like the Hoppip event that starts on March 9. So long as you have the Withered Wasteland Pokémon Center built, you can change the date forward to access the event fully. No other event dates have been announced so far, so I’m not entirely sure if you can do this for all events, or more will get added to the game via updates.
If you move backwards, it gets a little more fiddly.
If you time travel backwards, you will not lose progression. Recipes you learned will not vanish and buildings you make will not become undone. When you move backwards, it doesn’t change the typical daily reset things (like the daily shop stock). For example, if it’s March 5 and you set the date to March 8, your shop will update the way it usually would, since you moved forward. If you decide to set your time back to March 5, the store will still have what was in stock on March 8.
Additionally, if you are participating in the weekly stamp rally, and you time-travel backwards, your stamp card should reset to the correct card, if you ended up time-traveling weeks ahead, based on our testing. If you only skip forward within the week and then skip back to earlier days within that week, you won’t lose your stamps.
If you are time-traveling and do want to go back to your normal date, I do recommend restarting your game fully after doing so to restore it back to “normal” properly. There are some little things that will stick around for the remainder of the day if you don’t, like decorations from events, if you time-traveled to an event period.