Before heading into the Eternal Forest, I spent some time becoming Hyrule's biggest and most famous smoothie connoisseur. This will just be a very small entry, similar to the one for the Automatons, but I wanted to keep this separate from what comes next...
Well, I had collected enough of the smoothie ingredients by now to go through everything and fill the recipe book. I don't really like them as rewards from treasure chests, especially when it was a bit of a challenge to reach one, where they should have spread out the Might Crystals a bit more instead...
But after clearing the Slumber Dojo and exploring nearly all of Hyrule, I had more than enough of everything to go through all possible smoothie combinations, even if it meant creating rubbish.
You can totally waste the rare Golden Eggs by combining them with either Monster Guts or Monster Fangs, where this will turn into an Unfortunate Smoothie. It also feels completely arbitrary which of the two monster ingredients do actually create a potion for any of the given materials. For some both work and you get two different tiers. In other cases only the Monster Guts work or only the Monster Fang... Or they may not do anything at all, like with the Golden Egg.
It's a bit weird and there should have been only one monster part to simplify things. In Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom it never mattered what monster parts you've used in order to create potions, any would do the trick. But at least here it's a lot simpler to find all recipes than it was in those games...
There are 69 different smoothies in the recipe book, which doesn't count the Unfortunate Smoothie, so technically it's 70 in total. But I also wanted all the smoothie previews, so it doesn't say "new smoothie combination" after selecting any of the ingredients any longer. And since there are 16 of them, it means you have to make a total of 136 smoothies in order to complete everything. This also costs 1360 Rupees, but since you will need to sell most of them to make space, you will make a profit. I ended up with over 2200 Rupees at the end...
If you finish the side quest for the 20 recipes, the Survey Scope will be upgraded to the Survey Binoculars, so that's similar to the Curious Charm and you can't combine the stronger with the weaker version. And if you get all 69 recipes, you will receive 10 Golden Eggs, which made up for the ones I had wasted. Of course, there is no reward for going through absolutely all combinations, I have simply done this to satisfy my inner Monk.
Like with the Automatons, I'm not convinced that this feature offers a meaningful addition to the game. I suppose they needed something that lets you refill your energy if it ever runs out, which was helpful in the final Slumber Dojo challenge. But you already have the basic potions in the shops for that, where they could have used the four Fairy Bottles as normal bottles to store them...
There is not much need for the status effects, since you already have the accessories and clothing for that, where you can have them without a time limit attached. And any smoothie effect that is not part of the accessories and clothing probably should have been one (I still want those winter clothes).
And there is no real need for all the additional healing. You can fully heal yourself up to twenty times via smoothies, where this ridiculous trend of giving the player way too many healing items needs to stop. This game already has the Fairy Bottles and beds, which is more than enough to keep you alive. They didn't have to make an easy game even easier.
The smoothies seem like someone at Grezzo had this fun idea for more stylish potions, and it was a good fit for the Dekus... But they just went with it, without ever thinking about the balance.
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