Incredibly slow game startup times

My daughter is an avid Minecrafter with over 3000 hours played on the Switch. Over the past few years, we’ve noticed that startup times for the game have gone from very reasonable when we first started played 4 years ago (Version 1.17, Summer 2021) to absolutely terrible in the current version (1.21).

What I’m calling “startup” is the entire period from the time someone clicks Minecraft on the Nintendo Switch home screen through to the time everything is loaded, including the account and skin. Here are the phases of startup, and an approximation of times of each phase (I have timed with a stopwatch before, and these are my mental recollection of the average time):

1. Clicking the MineCraft icon and the Switch responding: Instantaneous

2. Nintendo splash screen (White Nintendo text on black background): Just a few seconds, ~4 sec

3. Black screen (The screen is entirely black): 8 minutes

4. Minecraft Loading Screen with Progress Bar: 3 minutes (much of this time is completely hanging, no movement on screen at all)

5. Minecraft Home Screen: Only a few seconds until it’s interactive, but 5 minutes until the account and skin are loaded

All said and done, we usually expect to wait about 20 minutes for Minecraft to load on her profile.

(The Marketplace can also often be slow to load, but that’s not my concern here.)

Interestingly (?), this only happens with my daughter’s Nintendo Switch profile. If any other profile starts the game, it’s typically fully started up in under 30 seconds, a reasonable time for typical switch games. Her account was also not this slow to load always. Originally, it was not any different from the rest of our profiles. The main differences being that she frequently plays on public servers, frequently plays on other players' worlds, and frequently makes purchases from the Marketplace. The rest of us only play on our own worlds in couch co-op or in realms.

I’ve attempted to clear the game’s cache and clean out downloads, ensure the game is stored in the Switch’s main memory and not on the SD card, and deleted and re-downloaded the game, with none of these things having any impact. Being docked or handheld, and being closer or farther (within reason) from the wifi router does not seem to have any impact, either.

With the release of 1.21, the bulk of the loading moved from the loading screen with the loading bar to the black screen portion.

As a final note, I don’t even specifically need a software fix. If there’s some other place I can go to manually clean up something (again, I’ve already tried clearing cache and all the standard things people suggest to make Minecraft faster), I’m happy to do that by hand every few months to keep it speedy for her.