The latest Animal Crossing: New Horizons patch addresses a bug that prevented balloons from spawning in the skies above players’ islands under “certain circumstances.”
Over the last week, Animal Crossing: New Horizons players have noticed something funky going on with the balloons that occasionally drift over their islands. Once the Nook Miles achievement for popping 300 balloons was reached, the floating treasures seemed to stop appearing. This wasn’t much of a problem in the first few weeks of the game’s life since balloons spawn so infrequently, but the ongoing holiday event exacerbated the problem.
That holiday, called Bunny Day, is all about finding eggs hidden by a creepy dude known as Zipper T. Bunny. It’s a limited event wrapping up on April 12, meaning players have a deadline to find the eggs they need to craft special outfits and furniture. There are several different types of eggs, from stone eggs encased in rocks to leaf eggs hanging in trees. Sky eggs, naturally, can be found attached to balloons, so the rate of balloon spawns has been increased, seemingly to help players find as many as possible over the next week and a half.
As such, Bunny Day contributed to a growing number of players coming face to face with the bug. With no balloons, this effectively locked players out of finding Bunny Day recipes and the sky eggs necessary to complete some of those DIY projects, not to mention more long-term goals like the golden slingshot and completing the smaller, random Nook Miles+ achievements for popping balloons.
A thread posted over on the Animal Crossing subreddit on March 30 chronicled one player’s experience with the missing balloons and, eventually, contacting Nintendo about the problem. It seems creating a second character fixed the issue as long as that character was being used, but only up until they too reached the 300 balloon milestone. While it’s entirely possible Nintendo was already aware of the problem, the time between the Reddit user contacting them about it and today’s patch was only a few days. Not bad!
So, if you were worried about missing out on floating items in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, never fear. You should be hearing the tell-tale whoosh of a balloon’s presence—or a couple hundred thanks to Bunny Day—in no time.
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