I owe it 100% to this thread on Twitter tbh! I’d had one after 12+h of grinding (including 7 in a day) and then tried their method and had 10 by the end of yesterday in less than half the time. Since that thread is long, lemme break down what I did.
The simplest way to put it is I stood on one of the lower squares of my island, close but not too close to the beach and just… waited. What I realized during all of this was the following:
Normal balloons will hit your beach at any timestamp ending in 5 or 0. They will not be there EVERY time, but if they’re gonna show up, that’s when.
Normal balloon spawns are based loosely on where you’re standing at 1 minute before any time ending in 5 or 0. I had a LOT of balloons show up directly across from where I was standing at 1 min til, but they could also be up to one “square” (the squares your HUD minimap is divided into) above or below, with the occasional balloon very rarely being very far away.
Balloon spawns on my island would come from the left until 6pm, at which point they’d come from the right instead.
With that in mind, I’d stand near the bottom corner of the map, about hereish per the wonky red dots:
I was doing this at my desk with my Switch undocked in front of my keyboard. I’d do literally nothing else in game other than run over to the beach and check up and down when the time changed to something ending in 5 or 0. At first I was going based on the official time on time.gov (and noticed my Switch time is ~2 second faster), but tonight I minmaxed even harder and just set a repeating alarm to go off every 5 min at ~15 seconds til it was time to check.
Then I just did other things (including make this blog!) with the time in between checks. It took about 8-12h of this to get everything. I got 10 yesterday and the last 4 today, and noticed way fewer drops today than yesterday (I spent about equal time both days!), so don’t be discouraged if you’re not getting stuff super fast right away.
Check ALL normal balloons. Color does not matter. I got cherry blossom DIYs from every color at least once
Ignore the rainbow balloons, they’ll just distract you & waste your slingshots since they only have eggs & Bunny Day recipes. I feel like I saw fewer egg balloons after crafting all the Bunny Day recipes, but that might just be placebo. You basically don’t need to listen for the whoosh at all anyways, except for when you’re checking the beach.
Slingshots have about 30 uses before they break. Bring a few customization kits and a DIY table to your camping location to refresh it so you don’t have to keep recrafting. (Or do recraft tbh, if you’re balls deep in Way Too Many Material Stacks in your small home storage like me lol).
By standing at the bottomish of the map I minimized the amount of space I’d need to check for balloons before I could go back to my camping spot, since there was only a small space below me they could show up (and usually they showed up above me).
PM was a way better grind time for me since the right side of my beach has no river breaks and a pier I could use to check the sky.
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