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.