Balloon

What Is Balloon?

Balloon is a navigation puzzle disguised as a flight game. You start at 220 metres with a cold envelope, four bags of sand, and a field somewhere between 400 and 900 metres away that you are supposed to land in. You have no way to point the balloon. What you have is a column of air that is blowing in five different directions, one direction per hundred metres of height, and a burner that lets you move between them.

Everything about the machine is slow and heavy and reluctant. The envelope holds 2,200 cubic metres of hot air and the whole assembly weighs 600 kilograms with the ballast aboard. Heat it and it does not rise. It stops sinking, eventually, several seconds after you asked. Open the valve and it does not fall. It stops rising, several seconds after you asked. Flying it is less like driving and more like arguing with a very large and very patient object.

The field you are aiming at is 400 metres across, which sounds generous until you notice that a routine descent from 200 metres drifts you about 258 metres sideways on the way down. The margin between a good landing and the wrong parish is not the accuracy of your flying. It is whether you started the descent in the right place, at the right time, in the right layer.

How to Play

Read the profile first. The column on the right of the screen is your only instrument that matters. It shows five layers between the ground and 500 metres, each with an arrow showing which way that air is going and how fast. Nothing else on the screen tells you where you will end up.
Find the layer going your way. Compare each arrow with the bearing to the field, which the map shows as a marker. One or two layers will be carrying you roughly towards it. The rest are carrying you somewhere else, and you need to know which is which before you climb into one.
Climb or descend into it. Hold up (or the top of the screen) to burn, down to vent. Then wait. The envelope takes several seconds to answer, and the balloon keeps moving in the direction it was already moving for a while after you stop.
Get the descent lead right. Do not start coming down over the field. You will drift 250 metres or more on the way down and finish somewhere you did not choose. Start the descent upwind of the field by roughly the drift you are about to take.
Spend ballast only when you mean to. A dropped bag is gone for good and permanently changes the temperature at which the balloon floats. It is not a boost you can take back. Four bags is all you get.
Land anywhere and see the score. Touching down ends the flight and reports how far off you were and how much fuel you had left. The best score is kept between flights.

The burner and the valve are not equally powerful, and that asymmetry is worth knowing from the start. Wide open, the burner eventually gives you a climb of about 4.1 metres per second. The parachute valve, wide open, gives you nearly 9.8 metres per second of descent. Going down is always easier than going up, which is the reverse of what most flight games teach.

The Five Winds, From the Ground Up

The profile is not one wind that varies smoothly. It is five separate winds, each about a hundred metres deep, and they sit roughly 72° apart. Which band you are standing in decides where you end up far more than anything you do with the burner, so it is worth knowing what each one is like before you commit to it.

The bottom band: The slowest and the most turned. Surface friction drags it back and swings it across, so it is usually the one heading least where you want to go. You start here, and you should not stay here.
The second band: The first one worth climbing for. Still slow, but most of the friction is gone, and it is the cheapest height to reach while the flight is young and you have time to be wrong.
The middle band: The working air. Fast enough to cover ground and high enough that the drift on the way down is something you can plan for rather than something that happens to you.
The fourth band: Fast, and the one that punishes a late decision. By the time you are up here the field is close and you have less altitude left to spend getting out of a band that turns out to be going the wrong way.
The top band: The fastest wind in the profile and the most expensive to reach. Good for a long transit, wrong for an approach, and there is nothing above it to escape into if you change your mind.

Tips for Arriving in the Right Field

Watch the arrows, not the balloon. The balloon shows you where you have been. The profile column shows you where you are about to go. By the time the drift is visible on the map, you have already spent it.
Burn early and gently. Two seconds of burner has moved you at 0.34 metres per second. Twelve seconds of the same burner has you at 3.43. The envelope is not a switch, and a short correction is almost invisible.
Aim off your intended height and coast into it. Cut the burner before you reach the layer you want, because the climb continues for another 18 metres or so after you let go. The same is true downwards, so close the valve early.
Hold your height while you travel, not just when you arrive. Sitting at a chosen altitude costs heat continuously. The envelope is eighty-odd degrees warmer than the air around it, and it is losing that heat the whole time. Altitude is rent, not an asset.
Prefer the fast layer if the bearing is close. The layers run between 5 and 9 metres per second, nearly a factor of two. A layer going 20° off your ideal bearing at 9 m/s will usually beat a perfect one at 5 m/s.
Save the ballast for the last hundred metres. A bag is worth about 8°C of neutral temperature, which is a large permanent change. Spend it early and you will find yourself fighting a balloon that wants to go up for the rest of the flight.
Do not chase a moving target. The whole column rotates through the flight, about 37° of veer in two minutes at 250 metres. Climbing to a layer you scouted a while ago and finding it has turned is normal, not a bug in your reading.

Most flight games give you a stick and ask how well you can point the aeroplane. This one removes the stick entirely and asks a different question: if you cannot choose your direction, what is left to choose? The answer turns out to be almost everything interesting about flying, and it takes about thirty seconds of play to feel it.

The mechanism is real. Surface friction slows the wind near the ground and turns it across the isobars, which means the air at 50 metres and the air at 350 metres are genuinely going to different places at different speeds. A balloonist navigates by climbing into a layer going their way and descending out of one going the wrong way. That is the entire art of the sport, and it is the entire game here. In this column the five layers run 72° apart from each other, so climbing from the bottom to the top of the usable air swings your track through almost the whole compass.

What makes that a puzzle rather than a lookup table is that the layers are not labelled and the balloon does not tell you which one you are in. You have to read the profile, commit, and then live with the fact that the thing you committed to is drifting. Measured over a 45-second flight from five different altitudes, the best layer gained 169 metres on the target and the worst lost 269. That is a spread of 438 metres, more than the width of the field you are trying to land in, and it comes entirely from where you chose to sit.

Why you can hold a temperature but not an altitude

Here is the fact the whole game rests on, and it is the one that surprises people who know a little physics. A balloon floats when the air inside it is light enough that the envelope plus everything hanging off it weighs nothing. The temperature at which that happens, the neutral temperature, is 97.5°C at ground level and 98.6°C at 500 metres. It barely changes with height at all.

That is not a coincidence or a simplification. Pressure and temperature fall together as you climb: at the surface the air outside is 1.225 kilograms per cubic metre at 15°C, and at 500 metres it is 1.167 at 11.8°C. Both sides of the buoyancy equation shrink together, so the ratio between them, which is the only thing that matters, stays almost exactly where it was.

The consequence is strange and takes a while to internalise. Your burner does not set your altitude. It sets your rate of climb. Holding 99°C at 400 metres and holding 99°C at 100 metres are the same instruction: both mean roughly neutral, neither climbing nor sinking. Altitude is not a setting you dial in with the burner. It is the integral of how long you have spent above your neutral temperature, and you spend it like money.

This is why the game feels the way it does. There is no altitude control on the keyboard, only a heat control, and the heat control is leaky. Newton cooling takes 0.7% of the difference between the envelope and the outside air every second, so a balloon sitting perfectly neutral at its float temperature begins to sink the moment you stop paying attention. Hands off from 220 metres with a cold envelope, the flight lasts 49 seconds, drifts 530 metres, and scores 154. That is not a losing run. That is simply what happens when you do nothing at all.

Why the wind is not one wind

The profile column looks like an instrument but it is really a road map, and the important thing about it is that the roads are discrete. This is not a smooth gradient you can trim your way up. It is five layers, each one going somewhere specific, and your job is to be in the right one at the right time.

That discreteness is what makes the game tactical rather than fiddly. If the wind varied smoothly with height, an expert pilot would just hold the exact altitude that gave the exact heading they wanted, every time, and the skill would collapse into a single number. Because the layers are separate and 72° apart, there is no perfect answer, only a best available one, and the quality of that answer depends on which field you were given.

The rotation matters as much as the spacing. A steady wind profile would be a map you could memorise once and then fly on autopilot. This one drifts: the whole column turns about 37° over two minutes, which is the same order as the time it takes to fly a whole descent. So the layer that was carrying you north-east when you climbed into it may not be by the time you need it again. Reading the profile once at the start and flying the plan is exactly the mistake the game is designed to punish.

Flying a descent you cannot see

The hardest single skill here is the one that has no feedback while you are doing it. You have to start your descent upwind of the field, in the wrong place, on purpose, and trust that the wind will carry you over the target on the way down. Start it over the field and you will finish 258 metres past it, which is a comfortable distance past the far fence and in a different field entirely.

What makes this learnable rather than a gamble is a property of the model that is also true of the sky. The wind is a function of height and time only. It does not care where you are. That means the descent path is repeatable and predictable: fly it once and you will get the same drift next time. A pilot who integrates the profile down the column gets the lead right and lands dead centre; a pilot who guesses lands wherever the arithmetic puts them.

That is the real shape of the game. It is not a reflexes test and it is not a simulation of a hundred buttons. It is a planning problem where the plan has to be made before the evidence arrives, and where the evidence, when it does arrive, is not whether you flew well, but which field you are standing in.

Flying a Balloon From a Phone

Everything in this game happens on a timescale of several seconds. The envelope takes about four seconds to visibly answer the burner, the balloon keeps coasting for twenty more, and a whole descent takes three-quarters of a minute. There is nothing to react to quickly, which means there is nothing a thumb costs you against a keyboard.

On a desktop, up and W open the burner, down and S pull the valve, space drops a bag of ballast, and P pauses. The keys are momentary, so the burner closes the instant you let go, which is what you want for the small corrections that holding an altitude demands.

On a phone or tablet, hold the top of the screen to burn and the bottom to vent, and tap the ballast button at the bottom of the page when you want to shed a bag. The screen is halved for you rather than mapped to buttons, so you can hold a correction with your thumb without looking away from the profile column, which on a phone is the part of the display worth watching. The column is sized proportionally, so it stays legible on a narrow screen instead of being squeezed off the edge.

Questions

Balloon — FAQ

Can I steer the balloon at all?

No, and that is the point. There is no control surface and no vectored thrust. The only thing you can change is your altitude, and the only thing altitude changes is which layer of wind you are sitting in. Every bit of steering in this game is really a choice about which wind to be in.

Why does the burner do so little?

Because it is heating 2,200 cubic metres of air through an envelope that is already losing heat to the sky. Two seconds of burner gives you 0.34 metres per second of climb; twelve seconds gives you 3.43, and about 4.1 is as good as it gets. The burner is a tap, not a control, and almost every beginner mistake in this game comes from treating it like a throttle.

Why do I keep overshooting my altitude?

Because the balloon is still moving when you stop the burner, and it keeps moving for a while. Released from a steady climb, the envelope carries the balloon another 18 metres upward over the following 25 seconds. The fix is to stop burning before you get there, the same way you close the valve before you have finished descending.

What is ballast actually for?

It makes the balloon lighter, permanently. Each 45 kilogram bag lowers the temperature at which the balloon floats by about 8°C, which means it needs less burner to hold the same height for the rest of the flight. It is a change to the aircraft, not a boost, and you only get four of them.

Why did my layer change direction mid-flight?

Because the wind profile rotates. The whole column turns roughly 37° every two minutes, so a layer that was carrying you towards the field when you climbed into it may be carrying you somewhere else by the time you get down. Re-read the profile as you fly rather than trusting your first reading.

How close do I need to get, and how is the score worked out?

The field is 400 metres across, so anywhere inside 200 metres of the centre counts as in the field. The score falls away smoothly with distance rather than cutting off at the fence: on the spot is worth 260 with an empty tank, 100 metres out is 151, 400 metres out is 75, and even 900 metres out still pays 48. Leftover fuel is worth a little on top, and arriving with the tank dry costs you a third of the score.

Keep flying