Today we are going to uncover where do balloons go if you don't pop them in ACNH. In previous Animal Crossing games including Wild World and Animal Crossing New Leaf, they had a barrier where the balloons would fly over and you can't access anymore, but in New Horizons, the land is completely surrounded by water which we can easily swim through. So let's jump right into this guide.

ACNH Where Do Balloons Go If You Don’t Pop Them

Figure out the wind direction. Every island has wind that blows either east to west or west to east. We should figure out the wind direction for by looking at villager houses and seeing which way the smoke blows out of their chimneys, you can also look at your own house to see which way your smoke is blowing and if you happen to see a balloon, you can easily see what direction it's floating. Your wind direction does flip at night, so during the day it will blow one direction and at night it will blow the other direction. So on this island, they wind blows west to east during the day which will tell us which side of the island the balloons will appear from. And to find these balloons for our experimentation, they will spawn at different starting points on the west beach, they could start at the top, they could start at the middle, they can start on the bottom, you just need to check everywhere.

Balloons also spawn only on the 4th and 9th minute every 10 minutes which calculates to only 12 balloons an hour, but a balloon is not even guaranteed to spawn at all on the 4th or 9th minute. However, there is a way to increase the spawn rate but it involves putting a curse on your island, a curse that no one can escape, a curse that will never die, the curse that ruined the game for all Animal Crossing New Horizons players in 2020 and that is the curse of zipper tea bunny. Zipper has this horrible superpower to make his bunny day balloons spawn up to one every minute. They also fly through the air much faster than regular solid color balloons. So for this experiment where we have to follow the balloons on the island we'll have to be speedy. So we can time to time travel to the worst holiday in New Horizons which happens to start on April 10th this year. So with this increased balloon spawn rate, it'll be much easier to find a balloon which will help us see exactly where these balloons go if you don't pop them.

Another way to help find these balloons faster is to set up a barrier along the west beach to trap balloons. All we need to do is placing some medium wood partitions right along where the beach meets the sand, because the partitions are so tall. The balloons actually can't fly over them, so the balloon is forced to fly south, so all we have to do is stand at the southwest beach and balloons will fly right to us. 

Experiments for where do balloons go if you don’t pop them

We're going to follow the scientific method that science class you took in middle school is finally applicable and our purpose is obviously to find out where balloons go if you don't pop them. We’ll which direction the balloons fly onto island and how to figure out how to determine the wind direction to begin with. And now for the experiment part:

• 1. On the beachless island, there is a red balloon, it's flying a little bit slower, so this should be easier to follow it and keep it in the bottom left . Keeping right up with the pace right next to that balloon, swimming through the barrier, it's flying up, it's going fast, the balloon starts to shrink. However, the present is shrinking much faster than the balloon itself. Present here is almost microscopic, but the balloon is still a good size, so we can depict what it is and the present is basically gone, it's literally just one pixel on the screen and a little itty bitty balloon, smaller and smaller until it's gone. This experiment is successful.

• 2. You must repeat the experiment a sufficient number of times to ensure you get the same result every time. The west side barriers have worked and we've trapped a blue balloon, that balloons just happened to spawn closer to the east beach but the method was a success. And then we just follow the blue balloon over to the ocean and jumping all over this balloon. And into the ocean, keeping it at a nice low left-hand corner position just where we want it. You can tell it's despawn sequence is starting when it starts to move much faster than it was when flying over the island, also you can tell when it starts to flow upwards, but yet we haven't changed position and the little itty bitty present slowly disappears into oblivion and our blue balloon is hanging in there and so this experiment success.

• 3. We have a glorious and not annoying bunny day balloon also caught by barrier. It looks like the present is not even attached the balloon, in the previous attempts, you could still see the teeny teeny balloon string holding up the present but here it just looks like they've separated already and this experiment is successful.

So the conclusion is if you don't pop the balloons, they will float over your oceans past the net barrier and then become so small that you can't even see them anymore. So this is different than what we thought would happen where the balloon just flashes and is gone, but we could have predicted that the balloon would shrink and would have a nice de-spawn animation because no items really flash out of the game. If you try to catch a fish and fail, the fist shadow swims away. If you try to catch a cherry blossom, it spins really fast as it fades and the same thing with bugs. If you don't catch them or you scare them away, they also simply fade, they don't magically poof, there's no hard transition where something disappears. Everything in Animal Crossing is thought out even when items disappear that you would never actually see and that's what happens to balloons when you don't pop them in Animal Crossing New Horizons.