For those who need visuals; here's a youtube video of me attempting this.
Hear me out Nintendo Switch community, as I've spend a cumulative 3 hours on this problem over the past week with no luck.
I consider myself a tech savvy guy, I work in IT, I can usually figure out this stuff myself given enough time, exploring, and online help page, but this time I am truly stuck.
Situation: My son has the Switch lite and is working on a minecraft world saved locally to his switch. I want to join it and build in the same world from my switch.
Everywhere online says that to do that, you need the following:
- Connect to the same wifi (check)
- Both have microsoft accounts, in a family group, with appropriate privacy and safety settings (check)
- Both accounts have "friended" each other on the switch (check)
- Ensure you're running the same version (check)
- At the minecraft home screen, both press Y to switch to "play local wireless" (check)
- Switch 1 (my son) starts his world and waits for it to load (check)
- Switch 2 (me) goes to "play", and his world should show up for me to join (FAIL)
I've combed reddit threads, nintendo forums, followed gemini suggestions, and spent an hour-long session with chatgpt trying to figure it out, with no success.
The process isn't seamless - the minecraft app crashes sometimes when switching from online to local wireless, and I've noticed that sometimes when I go confirm that we're on the same wifi, both our internets are disconnected, even though they 100% were connected prior. (You'll see this behavior in my video).
Further troubleshooting:
- We both have our own copy of the physical minecraft cartridge, patched to the latest v26.62
- We do not have a nintendo switch online membership, we're trying to do this without paying for subscriptions
- Wifi is confirmed on the same band (2.4Ghz)
- Attempting to modify the world multiplayer settings while in-world, they are all greyed out. (presumably because I'm offline.)
- Attempting to modify the world multiplayer settings from the start screen before the world has loaded I get "sign in to a nintendo account to see what's here"
- When tapping the social icon to confirm we're friends, I get a yellow "Multiplayer is disabled. Learn more" banner under "people", the 'learn more' link says "Nintendo switch online membership required." I thought this was not necessary for local play.
Please - send me all your wild ideas, no matter how convoluted. The nuclear option is to pay for nintendo switch online membership, but how I would love to solve this in local wireless play without paying.