This Animal Crossing Balloon Tracker Brings Calm to Chaos

I have spent too much personal time building an island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) recently, with no experience playing prior AC editions. In fact, I had never heard of the game until 2019. In another fact, I never owned a game console until the Nintendo Switch (even that I bought six months after it went to market). What does this all mean? It means I have no standards to assess what is good about a game, according to some of The Game Experts, because I am new here and don’t know what I like all the time.

Soul-baring out of the way, I want to share one more thing. Animal Crossing has these balloons that float across your island, which is your home base in the game. The balloons carry presents for you to open, according to an ancient present tradition. Here’s where the juicy game stuff comes in.

People who are better than me at understanding how ACNH works figured out how the balloons spawn and creator RayPS did a very good job tapping this secret knowledge and bringing it to life in the Balloon Timer app. When a balloon spawns, you can use this to find it.

If you know why this app is significant, then you can stop reading this and get back to your game and find the balloons. But if you do not know, I will explain: the balloons carry individual presents and as they float along above your island, propelled by the wind, you can shoot them down with a slingshot. These presents hold surprises. This is exciting because surprises are unknown quantities. You’re unaware of the delight or disappointment that awaits you. Animal Crossing: it’s like real life.

RayPS shared this with me about building the app: “We all know the balloon only spawns at the time ending with '0' or '5', then the next one will be spawn after 5/10/15 minutes. Finally, I just did some speed measurement for the balloons, I found out the speed of the balloon is 1 grid cell per 64 seconds!” There you go.

Spiderland proprietor Melissa, who is listed as Total Trash on their passport, used the tracker to find so many balloons that they acquired the ability to build the Golden Slingshot tool, which sounds like a real blast.

For the full interactive experience, test this app and tweet @glitch about it. We want to celebrate your wins. A couple of tips: walk around because the balloons spawn near different parts of the island. Avoid entering buildings or dialogue because it may disrupt the accuracy of the tracker. Cassey adds that islands have a different side that balloons will start on during the day, and the opposite side is where they will start at night.

Like I said, I’m not really a gamer. We live in a cynical world—a cynical world—and we work on an island with tough competitors. I’m just one person, unwrapping the gift of shared knowledge, one slingshotted balloon at a time.