How to prevent your villagers from moving out

How to prevent your villagers from moving out after a long hiatus.
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First, let's get the obvious things out of the way.
If you stop playing for over 2 weeks, it is very likely that your favorite villager will move out.
It is also impossible for more than 1 villager to leave during your hiatus.
Traveling backwards in time to save a villager will never work, since traveling backwards does not undo actions.
Every new day you play is a new day moving forward.

For villager moveouts, the game only cares how many days passed between your last play and the current date according to the in-game clock.
If the current date exceeds a villager's planned moveout date, that villager will leave!
As soon as you load your mayor, all time-sensitive villager transactions are permanently saved and there is no way to undo it.

Fortunately, everything else about this game is treated as time traveling 1 day into the future, even when going backwards.
If you saved and quit on the same day that a villager asked about moving out and you said no, no villagers will move out between then and until you start playing again.

If you're (reasonably) paranoid, create a second character, and go through the opening sequence.
This will not save the game, you're free to walk around and see if anyone left. Then just quit without saving.

If someone did leave, set the time back to 1 day before you stopped playing and load up your mayor. This will not cause any moveouts.
Now just play as normal and look out for villager moveout pings.
If you get none, save and quit, and fast forward 1 day. Keep doing this until someone pings you to move out.
As soon as you get a moveout ping, say no, save and quit and then you can time travel back to the present.

All your villagers should be there if you did everything right.


"Rekindling" friendships.
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If you thought you could safely get away with defeating a core game mechanic, think again!
Since the game thinks you haven't played in over 2 weeks, the villagers will stop approaching you because you've ignored them for over 2 weeks.
This means that you will not receive moveout pings, or any pings at all.
If they were planning on moving out, they won't tell you and this will have all been for nothing.

As soon as you get back to the present day, you must talk to all of them again, ASAP.
All you have to do is talk to them at least once, but only when they're outdoors or at home.
You will know if it worked because they will remark that they "haven't seen you in weeks" or other similar dialog.

If they're in a building, like in a shop, they will only talk about the location they're in, and it won't count.
When you load up your game, not all of them will be outside or at home, so you must save and quit and reload multiple times to get the ones you missed.

This doesn't have anything to do with friendship level, so don't worry about it.


How to prevent this from happening again and why you probably shouldn't.
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If you're going to stop playing for a long time, make sure you stop playing on a day when you received a moveout ping.

You should also consider whether stopping villager moveouts on a regular basis is worth your time.
The game was designed to get you to see new faces often and not have you worrying about micromanaging your dreamies.
Forcefully keeping the same 10 villagers trapped in your town was never an intended design choice and is a literal perversion of ACNL game mechanics.

Good luck!

** last updated 7/21/16 by wut