This was going to be the last update of the year 2023, but I hadn't reached my intended milestone yet, where over Christmas and the New Year I've been mainly hunting different materials to enhance all of my armor sets to ★★★★.
I've also been adding a good number of entries to my Hyrule Compendium, where both of this went hand in hand at times, because with certain materials and critters it really helps to set your Sensor+ on them. And I've also started to wear the Korok Mask most of the time to see where I may have missed some of the little forest spirits.
Back to the Kingdom
Since I should be mostly done with exploring both the Skies and the Depths, it was time to get back to Hyrule itself. And it's not the most enticing layer of the map, because it's just the world of Breath of the Wild all over again, as a glorified 2nd Quest, even though this is where you have the most variety with all its different biomes.
The one thing I really didn't miss elsewhere is the weather... This game has just the perverted need to make it rain whenever possible and I still hate it. Yes, there is the Froggy Armor now, but that doesn't really help if you're trying to get somewhere with a vehicle and then it gets too slippery.
I'm not even sure why I still bother to use whatever is available for transporting Koroks or supporting Addison. You're wasting your time if you don't just throw out your hover bike or a hover stone to be done with it, but it's more fun and satisfying to solve the given "puzzle", which is why I keep doing that. If I ever replay Tears of the Kingdom, then I probably won't bother, however.
Searching for Koroks and Addison isn't my primary goal at the moment, though. At first I thought I would just study the Hero's Path to aim at major gaps, but it looked like I've been pretty much everywhere already, just with small gaps here and there. Of course it's often these gaps that can still hide something, but I also ran past by stuff many times without noticing, because I haven't been paying close attention, and/or I wasn't wearing the Korok Mask.
I didn't want to use the Korok Mask or the treasure chest sensor when first going into any area, because it's much more satisfying to find and discover things by yourself. That's why I never really liked the Maiamais in A Link Between Worlds that much, because they are always cheeping "I'm here, I'm here". Wearing the Korok Mask effectively turns all the hidden Koroks into Maiamais, but for the most time I'm noticing the puzzles before the masks even starts reacting, because they are much more obvious this time. There are literally arrows pointing at some of the locations, while there is also still the occasional single rock at some random cliffside deadend.
But I was in need of a better goal than simply "comb through every corner of Hyrule", which is why I decided to focus on filling out the Hyrule Compendium and collecting any missing materials required for the armor enhancements that I don't have yet. This brings me all over the world anyway and I can check some of the gaps in the Hero's Path while I'm at it.
Filled Path
Speaking of the Hero's Path... During my efforts I finally reached its limit. And this makes me a bit sad, because it documents how I've been adventuring all over the place. Since you can only replay it from either the beginning or the end, it's not all too valuable other than seeing where you've already been. And even with that it may be a good thing that it starts to erase where I've been in the beginning, because those are the places where I've likely missed something. Still, it's part this playthrough's history and I'm sad to see it go.
It gives you 256 hours and it's not an issue if you play more efficiently, but that's obviously not me on my first time. The same thing also happened when I first played Breath of the Wild on the Wii U. Anyway, I decided to capture it all, right when it started to dissolve, just to have it saved somehow. So, if you're curious about how aimless I was most the time, you can now take a look for yourself:
There are no deaths recorded, but that's only difficult to achieve during the early parts, which now get erased anyway. Just like in Breath of the Wild, you can also close the game right when you get a Game Over to avoid it being recorded, where I think I did this once very early on, so this should still work. And loading older save files also won't merge the path with the latest save any longer, so you have all the possibilities to fix things.
Maybe I should have used those possibilities a bit more, because there are some weird straight lines going all over the map, where it
shows me as teleporting when I replay these parts. Not sure what has
happened there, but this looks to be a glitch...
Compendium Close-Ups
When it comes to Hyrule Compendium, I've been quite lazy so far. I tried taking good pictures of weaponry whenever I found something new and I also tried to not miss any of the bosses, especially the one-timers, but that's about it.
To be completely honest, I wouldn't miss this feature if it were not to return in the next 3D Zelda, because it triggers so many OCD'ish quirks in me. I don't want to miss anything, but I also want to take nice pictures of everything. They need to look the part, where my inner perfectionist is hard to satisfy. I definitely prefer the figurines in The Wind Waker here, where it doesn't matter how the photo looks. As long as you have captured on camera whatever you want to have, it will create the desired outcome.
Well, you can always just buy the compendium pictures from Robbie (or Symin in Breath of the Wild), where you don't have to worry about anything. That's what I did in my last two playthroughs of Breath of the Wild, but with my first playthrough I want to play more thoroughly, soak all aspects of the game in, no shortcuts whatsoever.
And by now I'm starting to have fun with this again. Like in my first playthrough of Breath of the Wild (check this out), I have done this wonderful arrangement of all the fish. It just looks nice and you don't get this when purchasing the default pictures, where it can be nice to have a level of creative freedom with such things.
Anyway, the bad weather in Hyrule is also a problem for when I'm trying to take pictures, as I had mentioned before. You spot a creature and get close to it, have the perfect angle and everything, but then clouds suddenly appear before the sun, rain ruins the image, and then lightning strikes directly into whatever you wanted to capture... Ugh.
You can resort to your house, however, which has its own climate zone of "Always Sunny", but the flowery underground or the green wood slats might not be for everything. Alternatively, the sky islands and the Shrines of Light can serve as a good photo studio, where I mostly use those for anything related to the Zonai. I want the underground to match the subject. But this only really works with weapons, fish, and materials anyway, where everything else has to caught in the wild. It sometimes helps to take a bad picture first, so it's easier to find whatever you're looking for later, so that you can improve said picture. You may not even find what you're looking for so easily again...
Anyway, I've updated my progress at the bottom of the post with my current Hyrule Compendium completions stats. It wasn't my focus this time, so there's still lots to do here, but it's a start and it will become my next bigger focus after this episode.
Material Master
As already mentioned at the beginning, my main goal this time was to fully enhance all armor sets. And with the exception of the Hero of Time and Hero of Twilight sets, where I still need to grind a good number of Star Fragments, I have achieved this goal. It made sense to prioritize this, because if it's the last thing I'm going to complete, I won't get much out of it. So, I placed one of my Travel Medallions right next to Cotera and got ready for material hunting business.
Curiously, I had most of the new armor sets – the Glide set, the Froggy set, the Miner's set, the Depths set, and the Yiga set – already finished, where most of my remaining work was about fixing up all the armor from Breath of the Wild... again. But it does make sense, because I had focused on exploring the new environments with the sky islands, the caves, and of course the Depths, which is where you will find the necessary materials for many of the new armor items. Not all of it, though.
Now, for the remainder of this post I will mainly talk about the struggles of getting enough of everything... As with most things about this game, I did this blindly and I wanted to discover as much as possible by myself, so I haven't looked up the best farming spots on the internet. But this also means that I may not be giving the best advice, if you're also looking to do the same. I'm also aware that there are duplication glitches that would help tremendously with this, but I refrain from using glitches when playing Zelda.
Let's start with the Star Fragments, because that's still in progress and something that I kept doing periodically. You need a lot of them to enhance all the armor, over 100 in fact, primarily from all the pieces that can be gotten via amiibo, where this is an issue that carried over from Breath of the Wild. At least, it's easier to get Star Fragments now, because you can often grab them directly while sky diving through the night. And you may even spot a normal shooting star in the process, so it's possible to get more than one per night now. I even got multiple falling fragments during the same night, but in different locations...
Certain areas seem to be likelier to give you Star Fragments during a sky dive than others, where I think that it correlates with the dragons' routes. For example, the tower at the Typhlo Ruins usually gives me one, where the Light Dragon and Dinraal cross paths. I also got good results from the Rabella Wetlands and Gerudo Canyon, where Naydra and Farosh pass by respectively. You don't necessarily want to use the Skyview Towers there, however, where jumping down from any sky island can do the trick. The towers are more fun, though.
Anyway, because the locations are close to the dragons, this can go hand in hand with farming all the necessary dragon parts, where you need plenty of them as well to enhance the Champion's Tunic and Leathers, the Fierce Deity set, the Hero of the Wild set, and for some reason also the Snow Boots. I had already fully enhanced the Fierce Deity set before, because that's my favorite and very useful, which needs one of all the dragon parts from Breath of the Wild. The new Champion's Leathers, which only requires the new Light Dragon parts, was also already done, but I had some grinding left to do for the rest. Luckily, this turned out to be not much of an issue, since you can often combine this with hunting Star Fragments. Just land on the nearest dragon afterwards.
And both of these activities is what I kept doing at the sidelines, while I was searching for any other missing materials. Let's first talk about something simple, where you have to collect Swift Violets for both the Sand and the Snow Boots, as well as the Climber's set. The problem here is the amount, where you need 90 for everything and I had like 70 left. They have increased those amounts over Breath of the Wild for some reason...
Well, you just have to know where to find one, put it into your Hyrule Compendium, and then follow the beeping sound. They grow plentiful all around the Gerudo Canyon and Highlands, but it still took me a while to get enough of them. And I certainly made good use of the Climber's set, which is what this was all for, only to put it away afterwards. At least I'm using the Snow and Sand Boots quite often.
Speaking of, you also need five Hearty Lizard for the Sand Boots, and this is where I was running into my first mystery item, where I had no real clue where to look for them. I had some in my inventory, but I didn't take a photo, so I couldn't set the sensor on them. Well, you could theoretically let one go and try to get a picture, but good luck with that... And it won't let you take compendium entries of dead animals, believe me, I tried (with Hightail Lizards, because I have 150 of them from all the Evermeans).
The description states that you can find Hearty Lizrads "deep in the forests", where I don't think that's true for either game. In Breath of the Wild they were mostly sitting on palm trees, around Lurelin Village and such, which doesn't seem to be the case any longer. But then I remembered that I found the ones I had inside caves, and I hit the jackpot in the Mount Dunsel Cave, right next to Lurelin Village.
Another mystery item where the Rhino Beetles, which are required for the Barbarian and Hero of the Wild sets. For a moment I was even beginning to understand why Beedle is so obsessed with them, because they had escaped me until now. In fact, I hadn't gotten a single Energetic Rhino Beetle yet and I didn't have any of them in my compendium.
Well, I vaguely remembered that I saw one in Akkala, before I got interrupted by randomly spawning annoyers, but I wasn't sure whether this was in Breath of the Wild or in Tears of the Kingdom... When I went back there I couldn't find any, but at that point I was missing the crucial information that they only appear during the night. The insect maniac, who you can rescue from attackers all over Hyrule, teaches you about this, but you have to be in the right spot to learn this and not something about the other insects.
In Breath of the Wild you could find some on the large elephant trees, but again I was looking there during the wrong time of day, because whenever it became dark I went immediately off diving for Star Fragments. At least I was able to finally find one at the Faron Grasslands and take a picture, but it was a Rugged Rhino Beetle, the only type that you don't need for any upgrades...
It was a start, however, which brought me to the Guchini Plain, where you can find both Rugged and Bladed Rhino Beetles on the trees there. I ended up going in circles, eyed by the Thunder Gleeok in the distance, just to collect as many as I could. Their compendium entries both state "West Necluda, East Necluda" for their common locations, where I'm also not sure that this is correct..
I headed in that general direction anyway, into the Faron Woods, but this is where I really started to hate those Forest Octoroks again. I don't think they could have possibly designed a more annoying enemy for this game and the Sages are pretty useless here, where Wolf Link did a much better job of hunting them down. In the early game I was happy that you can take them out with Recall now, while the Earthwake technique also works quite well, but it doesn't really help much in areas where the forest is crawling with them...
But after some struggles I finally found the Rhino Beetle Paradise: it's the Bronas Forest, right at the Dondon pen. On the trees around here you can find all three types of beetles, which is where I found my first Energetic Rhino Beetles. And almost every tree had some beetle on it, where this might be one of the best farming spots for all of them.
The Great Fairies ask for nine of the both the Bladed and the Energetic Rhino Beetles, however, where I still needed some more of the latter. But its Hyrule Compendium entry states that you can also find them on the Great Sky Islands, which made a shocking amount of sense – the yellow beetle for the golden trees!
So, I was back to where it all began, collecting the rest of them. There was a certain irony to it that you can potentially collect enough of these rare beetles right at the beginning of the game, given that you're paying attention to them between all the new stuff that is going on. I was also able to find one more Korok who had escaped me back then...
Needless to say, when dealing with any kind of critter you want to approach them with double or even triple stealth effects. The Stealth, Yiga, and Evil Spirit (Phantom Ganon) sets will do the trick here, where I've been wearing all of them at some point. The Evil Spirit is the weakest one in terms of defense, but it's closest in the menu to the other armor pieces I use regularly (Fierce Deity set and Korok Mask), so it's a bit more convenient. And for a while I've been picking the Yiga set over the Stealth set, because I hadn't fully upgraded the latter yet, so the Yiga set offered the better defense values.
Which brings us to the next item on the list: trouts. You need Stealthin Trouts for the Stealth set, just like in Breath of the Wild, but also Sizzlefin Trouts, Chillfin Trouts, and Voltfin Trouts for the new dragon sets. And yes, I'm enhancing everything, whether I'm actually using the items or not, where I'm not sold on the weather attack boost stuff (yet). Luckily, I had all the fish in my compendium already, so I was good to go with the sensor.
Sizzlefin Trouts were probably the easiest to find out of all of these, because you just have to visit the hot springs around Death Mountain or the Hebra Mountains. If you go to the Sturnida Secret Hot Spring, you may also find Chillfin Trouts in the cave there, so that's a good spot to hit two fish with one stone.
Voltfin Trouts are not that far away, for some reason, where I mainly got them out of the Hebra Plunge and the Strock Lake, which is also where you can get more Chillfin Trouts. That may seem convenient, but they are sharing their territories with some other types of fish as well and you have to catch them all over the lakes. Ideally, you want a small body of water that primarily has one or two types of fish, but I wasn't able to discover something like that for the Voltfin Trouts. You'd think that they would be all over the Faron jungle area, because that's where you obtain the Charged set and have this big thunder theme going, but nada.
As for the Stealthfin Trouts, they don't appear in Lake Saria any longer, which was their best farming spot in Breath of the Wild. I really don't get the change, because this location is actually more of a secret this time... Instead you have to go around the Lost Woods "moat", Lake Mekar, in the hopes of getting some.
I tried using the "Fishing Trawler" Yiga Schematic for this, but this was a waste of time. It's too slow and it kills the fish so early that they will usually drift past your boat. As with most problems that want to be solved with some Ultrahand/Autobuild construction, it's just the easiest and fastest to go with the hoverbike. It swims upright in the water, so you can just drop it whenever the sensor tells you that the desired fish are below you and then pick it up again. And if you wear some stealth-boosting armor, the fish won't swim away from you. So, just jump into the water, collect the fish, get back on your hoverbike, repeat. This seems to be the best method to collect fish from larger lakes and possibly also the ocean.
Let's move on to materials that come from enemies. For the Zonaite Helm, I first had to collect all the different Captain Construct Horns one last time. You can find Captain Constructs IV pretty much everywhere at the end of the game, because many of the captains are scaling up, so those are not the problem, but finding the lower tiers was...
As for Captain Constructs I and II, you can revisit some of the Shrines of Light with "Proving Grounds". You can replay them without the Trial of the Sword restrictions and collect lots of lower tier Construct stuff, which is helpful. The following trials have lowest tier captains:
- In Reverse
- Lights Out
- Low Gravity
- Vehicles
And the Captain Constructs II are still present in these trials:
- Ascension
- Flow
- Intermediate
Curiously, there is a "Beginner" and an "Intermediate" Proving Grounds shrine, but no "Advanced". But these are some of the few places where I still could find Captain Constructs II, making them quite rare. The only other one was on Wellspring Island, not far from the Shrine of Light there. The Captain Constructs I on the other hand are still plentiful on the Great Sky Island. One is in the Shrine of Light that teaches you the Fuse ability, two are right next to the shrine for the Ascend ability, and one more can be fought on the detached island in the southwest corner. So, the lowest tier is easy enough to find.
The Captain Constructs III seem to be equally rare as II, but there are two of them sitting right in the Typhlo Ruins, where you can combine this with Star Fragment farming. Catch a Star Fragment and then land right on top of one of the two captains, where the other will be waiting in the adjacent chamber. You can also still find another one south of your house, close to a White-Maned Lynel.
This is the great thing about Tears of the Kingdom: because most enemies now come give you unique materials with their horns, the developers made sure that you can still find one of everything somewhere in the world. No more Lynels going extinct this time. In fact, you can just replay the Floating Coliseum if you need any more Lynel materials, because it has all of them. They are also easy to find in the Depths, because they linger right below stables on the surface. And I'm pretty sure you can find one of every tier and every fighting style somewhere still in the game... I really wish that Breath of the Wild would have done this.
Moving on to what was probably the worst grind after the Star Fragments: elemental Lizalfos Tails. I already had complained about their low drop rate in entry 22 and received a very useful tip from Florian Cova back then: go for the Gerudo Canyon. It doesn't help with the low drop rate, but you will find many groups of two or three Fire- or Ice-Breath Lizalfos there and not so many other enemies.
Their type changes with the day of time, where in the freezing night you will have Ice-Breath Lizalfos and during the hot day Fire-Breath Lizalfos. This causes some glitched spawning behaviors that may let the Lizalfos respawn without a Blood Moon whenever it becomes night or day. The sensor may also detect enemies that aren't currently there, but overall this is really ideal for farming many of those rare tails, which you need for the Snowquill, Desert Voe, and Yiga sets. It's 48 fire tails and 54 ice tails, so quite a lot...
You also need 54 of the Electric Lizalfos Tails for the Rubber and Yiga sets and here I'm afraid there are no shortcuts. I just kept swooping over the Gerudo Desert until I finally had enough... of both the Lizalfos tails and of grinding in general.
Finally, there is the supreme discipline of earning Gleeok Guts. As mentioned in entry 24, you need 19 of those in total: one for a side quest, nine for the Royal Guard set, and nine more for the secret last armor set. Only the latter really should have needed them, because this was getting a bit too much. And it may seem like a daunting task with the low drop rates from the three "basic" Gleeok types.
The King Gleeoks, however, are guaranteed to drop their guts (which are actually called "hearts" in some European translations). I'm not sure if it's a 100% drop rate, but I got some Gleeok Guts every time I had defeated a King Gleeok. And this made this task quite manageable.
My only real problem was that it takes so long to get to them, where they are very high up far away from everything else. The shortest to reach is the one above Hebra, but here you need to sacrifice some fire power for cold protection. You don't have this problem above Eventide Island, but it takes forever to get up to the sky island above. And at the Gerudo Skies it's both cold and takes too long...
Ironically, the most convenient King Gleeok to battle is the one in the Depths, in the Gleeok Den. This location is quick to reach and you only have to worry about the Gloom. Originally, this one gave me quite some trouble, so I was hesitant to go back there, but I got so much practice at fighting these things that it didn't concern me any longer after a while.
Mineru really is the VIP in these fights, given that she doesn't run away from you. After downing a Gleeok and dealing some good damage, you want to immediately get on her back and shield you from the wind attacks. Then you simply jump off for some easy slow-motion headshots. This is crucial for the final phase, because you reaaaaally don't want them to fly up. Just quickly hit their heads one last time and finish the job.
The best weapon to do this is the Demon King's Bow, so I'm also regularly confronting that guy as well, just to keep a nice stash of them. It does up to 60 damage and with some damage boost, e.g. from the Fierce Deity set, it's enough to take out each head with a single arrow and without any fusions. Its range is also very good, so you can snipe those Gleeok heads easily, even when they are further away.
Of course, if you can do all this, there's no need to enhance any armor any longer. But at least the Royal Guard set is very fancy and the other set has the best armor value in the game with a total of 84, so there's is something to get out of all these troubles, even if it's probably not worth it.
Material Madness
I can't finish this post without talking (once more) about the main issue of the material systems in Tears of the Kingdom and partly also in Breath of the Wild. While it's fantastic that most materials in the game got so much more utility thanks to the ability to weaponize them via Fuse and throwing, the armor enhancement system goes directly against this and all other uses, like selling or cooking materials.
Unless you look it all up on the internet (which I don't want to do), you cannot be sure that you still need certain rare materials until you've found and enhanced all armor pieces to at least three stars. And even if you have all the information, it's still a massive pain, because this prevents you from making good use of all the materials.
The gemstones, for example, sell for a high prices and give you very potent effects in combat. But up until now I was in no position to make use of any of that, because the armor enhancements are so demanding on them. In fact, I've completely used up all my Sapphires and Rubies for the Sky and Hero classic sets... (If you need Rubies, you can grab three from "Proving Grounds: Lights Out".)
It's just way too excessive and actively discourages you from making the most out of your rare materials. Now, only after all this time, I'm free to do with them whatever I want and free to experiment. And that's certainly not how it was supposed to go. True, it is only a problem if you want to fully enhance all the armor sets, a "completionist issue", where you may not care.
But unlike in Breath of the Wild all the material-heavy armor sets that you can get from amiibo are now rewards for exploring the new environments. And they are great rewards at that, where you may want to wear them for the sake of nostalgia, which is why it would have been nice if the developers had put in some efforts into balancing the material requirements accordingly.
Progress:
- Side Adventures: 59/60
- Side Quests: 122/139
- Korok Seeds: 777/1000
- Old Maps: 29/31
- Recipes: 108/228
- Map Completion: 91.29%
Compendium Completion:
- Creatures: 73/92
- Monsters: 86/110
- Materials: 40/126
- Equipment: 157/175
Treasure: 6/6
Remaining Medals:
- Taluses: 81/87
- Hinox: 65/69
