Whether it's building an island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, gliding around Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, or just enjoying the mayhem of Mario Kart 8, the Nintendo Switch is my favorite piece of technology to have been released in the last few years. But it's far from perfect, with a plastic build, a weird kickstand, and so-so battery life. And now, after two years of use, my Switch suffers from Joy-Con drift, which makes games seem possessive. If you're not touching the Joy-Con, your character will walk away on its own, and the selection screen will become a fast-scrolling mess. It's like someone has taken over the console, and they can't play games very well.
Joy-Con drift has been known about for years, but with increased gameplay during the coronavirus pandemic, many more Switch and Switch Lite owners are experiencing this annoying phenomenon for the first time. In fact, in June, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa apologized for “the inconvenience caused by Joy-Con issues.”
Luckily, there are a few ways to remedy this inconvenience, some of which require no tools and no money at all. Here are five ways to repair, clean, or replace your Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons.
If you experience Joy-Con drift, the first thing you should do is check the calibration.
Patrick Holland/CNET
1. Calibrating or recalibrating your Switch Joy-Con
If you notice any Joy-Con drift (especially the left Joy-Con), the first thing you should do is calibrate your controller. This is the easiest way to get things back to normal. It's worth knowing how to do this, as you'll end up looking at calibrating almost all of these tips at some point.
Method is as follows.
Remove the Joy-Con from the Switch console. Go to System Settings, scroll down to Controllers and Sensors, and select it. Select Control Stick Calibration. Then press down on the control stick of the controller you want to calibrate.
The Calibration Check screen will appear. If you're not touching or moving the control stick, a plus sign will appear in the center of a circle. If you're touching or moving the controller, a dot will appear. If you move the problem joystick, the circle will change color from black to blue. If not, you need to recalibrate your control stick.
To recalibrate, press the X button. You'll be asked to move the joystick in a specific direction and then release it – left, right, up, down – and then you'll be asked to rotate the control stick in a clockwise circular motion.
One of the easiest ways to fix Joy-Con drift is to clean the joystick with isopropyl alcohol.
Patrick Holland/CNET
2. Clean your Joy-Con joysticks
If you're still experiencing Joy-Con drift after calibrating and recalibrating, the next thing you should do is clean your control sticks. There is a sensor at the base of the control stick on the Joy-Con console. Cleaning this sensor will fix the Joy-Con drift issue for most people.
If you look closely at a joystick, it resembles a graduation cap. The bottom of the graduation cap has a rubber or silicone cover that covers the top of the mechanism. Moisten a cotton swab with 70% isopropyl alcohol and lightly press the cotton swab against the bottom of the “graduation cap” to get some alcohol underneath it.
Once you're done, rotate the joystick for 30 seconds to allow the alcohol to soak all the internal sensors, then leave it for 15 minutes to check the calibration.
Two warnings: Don't apply isopropyl alcohol directly to the joystick, as it may seep through the joystick mechanism and into other parts of the Joy-Con. Also, make sure your Joy-Con's batteries are fully drained before cleaning; electricity and liquid don't always mix well.
The first time I did this it worked: regularly cleaning the control sticks restored my Joy-Cons to peak condition.
Nintendo is running a Joy-Con repair program.
Nintendo
3. Nintendo will fix Joy-Con drift
If aligning and cleaning doesn't fix the issue, contact Nintendo for a repair. Nintendo offers a Joy-Con repair program for hardware that's under warranty for one year. However, Nintendo will repair any Joy-Con with drifting issues free of charge, even if they're out of warranty.
The problem here is that the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in Nintendo's repair facilities being scaled back and deliveries may be delayed, so no one knows how long it will be before we get our Joy-Cons back.
For more information, please visit Nintendo's support page.
Nintendo is selling the Joy-Cons for $50 each, the question is whether they'll be in stock.
James Phelan/CNET
4. Buy new Joy-Cons for your Switch
The other option (probably the most expensive on this list) is to buy a single new Joy-Con for around $50, but they often go out of stock, and even if you find one you can buy, it might not be the aspect or color you want.
And a pair of Joy-Cons will be even more expensive at $80, and we don't recommend buying second-hand ones as they may have issues with Joy-Con drift.
If you have the skill, patience, and confidence, you can always remove the faulty control stick and replace it with a new joystick.
Patrick Holland/CNET
5. Replace the joystick yourself
This last tip is the most drastic: you can remove the problematic joystick and install a new one into the housing. There are plenty of kits available online; I bought one on Amazon for $14 that came with two new analog stick modules and tools.
Opening up the Joy-Cons, removing the joysticks, and putting everything back together requires intermediate skill and a lot of patience, and the process voids Nintendo's one-year warranty.
To see what this process is like, check out our step-by-step guide. After following these steps, I no longer have issues with Joy-Con drift. That said, in the process of reassembling the controller, I ended up snapping the cable, rendering the left trigger button unusable. Obviously this was not an ideal outcome, but I'm willing to sacrifice a trigger button to eliminate Joy-Con drift.
Once you've got your Joy-Con ready, find out how to connect a PS4 DualShock controller or Xbox One controller to your Mac.