Exploration is key in all open-world games, and the same is true for Zelda TotK. While there are many things you can buy with in-game money, there are several cooler things to be found through exploration in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Not everyone wants to be constantly fighting, so players typically tend to relax and explore areas of the game between missions.
To improve your journey across the vast landscape of Hyrule, we have crafted some important exploration tips to keep in mind as you explore the world of Hyrule.
Each region of Hyrule in Zelda: TotK requires players to change their tactics. Without a solid grasp of all the gameplay systems and how they interact with open-world exploration, you will have difficulty surviving the weather conditions or dangerous areas.
Use Skyview Towers
As soon as you reach Lookout Landing, activate and use the Lookout Landing Skyview Tower. This will allow you to get the paraglider and instantly open the rest of the Sky Island map.
The Skyview Towers of each area allow you to reach the Sky Islands above and find useful items like Sage’s Wills and new Shrines. Skyview Tower also serves as a fast travel point; you can use it to reach difficult locations.
Can’t climb a cliff because it is too high or the rain causing you to slip? Just give your friendly neighborhood Skyview a visit and you are good to go.
Always Carry powerful Fused Weapons
You can never be enough prepared when making a journey across Hyrule. The land is full of monsters that will attack you on sight. To avoid difficult encounters, carry some powerful weapons.
Sort your items with their Fusion power and attach them to your weapons to increase their strength and durability. As weapons are prone to breaking, carry as many weapons as you carry.
Experiment with fusing items. Fuse everything to your weapons to check their unique properties. Don’t be afraid. You can always visit Lookout Landing to get more weapons for free.
Stock up on Arrows and Brightbloom Seeds
You will encounter a lot of dark caves in addition to depths. The only way to lighten up these places is by using Brightbloom Seeds.
You can either throw these seeds by hand or use arrows to cover a large distance. Brightbloom Seeds can also be farmed from caves by following our guide.
Many monster parts can be attached to weapons to make them deadly and kill enemies from a distance. Attaching a Keese or Aerocuda’s eyeball will turn your arrows into homing arrows, eliminating the need to target.
Similarly, you can attach chuchu jellies to inflict elemental damage. Arrows play a major role in defeating some bosses like Hinox and Molduga. Buy arrows from merchants and break containers to hoard as many as possible.
Collect Gems
Don’t shy away from collecting gems. Use your hammers to break any Ore Deposit that you come across. You can always make new weapons.
Ores mostly drop gems. These gems have two functions. You can either sell them for a hefty amount or fuse them with your weapons.
Sapphire and Ruby provide elemental properties to weapons. Ruby allows your weapon to shoot fireballs, and Sapphire’s weapon creates ice. When fused with your shield, Ruby protects you against cold, and Sapphire cools you down in the scorching weather of the Gerudo Desert.
Always Keep Tulin’s Ability Active
Upon completing legacy dungeons, you will get Sage’s Wills. These powerful avatars have unique properties and help you in and out of combat/exploration.
However, one ability surpasses them all. Tulin’s Gust ability allows you to cover large distances in the air without consuming stamina. Like the rest of the abilities, it has a cooldown time to avoid spam.
Tulin’s Gust ability also propels you upwards to reach places that can’t be reached otherwise. To travel the Sky Islands or to reach higher places, it is imperative that you keep this ability active all the time.
Use Pins and Stamps
Pins act like beacons in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and are an integral part of the exploration. They are limited in number and come in different colors.
If you see a distant shrine or any place of interest, place a pin on it. You can do this while gliding without any drawbacks. Once a pin is placed, you can see it from across the map. It will only disappear if you manually remove it or reach the marked location.
Stamps serve the same purpose and are unlimited in number. They can’t be viewed from afar, and you need to consult your map to see them. They come in different shapes and can be placed accordingly.
We recommend using them once you run out of pins or when you know the item at the location (boss/pot/fight) but want to visit it at another time.
There is a quest where there is White Smoke
White Smoke marks the point of interest. Whenever you see white smoke, go to it. It can be a side quest or a shrine quest waiting for you. A lot of missable quests are hidden behind the smoke.
Some side quests, like A Disaster in Gerudo Canyon, have no objective markers. You need to follow white smoke to find a couple of missing NPCs.
Follow Blupees
Caves are true treasure troves in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. They have rare items like Gems, Bomb Flowers, and Bubbul Gems.
Finding a cave is not easy. They are well hidden and are only marked on the map once you enter them. However, there is a surefire way to find a cave. You will notice glowing blue rabbits across Hyrule.
They are called Bluepees, and they reside in caves. Once you see a Bluepee, a cave is nearby. Just follow the scared rabbit, and it will lead you to the cave’s entrance.
Visit Stables as a Priority
Stables allow you to rest and register your horses. There are 15 stables in the Zelda: Totk, one near each major location.
Stables also offer many side quests, including Potential Princess Sightings. Each stable has a well that you can visit to gather loot and progress the Where Are the Wells side quest.
Stables are also home to merchants, including Beedle, who sells some useful stuff at a rip-off price. If you are short on arrows, just visit a stable and talk to Beedle.
Stables also offer unique beds that restore your health and stamina completely and grant you temporary ones to survive the next encounter.
Logs break the game
Want to reach a place the developers don’t intend you to find early in the game? Chop down trees and join their logs with Ultrahand to craft a massive bridge.
You can go anywhere with a long enough bridge and break the game in ways Eiji Aonuma wants you to. Just remember, bridge your way across the problem.
Upgrade your Zonai Battery
Zonai vehicles play a major role in transportation, especially in the skies. Some places are impossible to reach even with the help of Skyview Towers and Tulin’s Gust ability.
This is where zonai flying devices come in. You can attach batteries and a steering stick to a wing device and some fans. This custom flying device can go as high as you want.
However, zonai devices operate on batteries that you have in a limited number. You can no longer stay airborne once the batteries run out of juice. To remedy this problem, farm zonaite from the Depths and exchange them for crystallized zonai charges.
These charges can be used to increase the battery capacity by visiting the forge north of Lookout Landing.
Get Autobuild ability
Crafting the same machine over and over is no fun, especially when the game lasts about 50 hours. This is where the Autobuild ability comes into play.
Unlike Ultrahand, Fuse, and Ascend, Autobuild does not automatically appear. Follow our guide to obtain it. Once you have this ability, you can build any construct from memory.
All you need are zonaites, which you can farm from depths. You can also increase your construct memory by obtaining more schema stones.
Loot Everything
While your weapons and shield inventory are limited, the one dedicated to the resources is not. This allows you to loot infinite monster parts, cooking materials, and other useful items like flint and wood.
Tears of the Kingdom has a massive variety of plant life and monsters. Each monster type drops unique monster parts that can be used to brew elixirs or fuse with weapons. You can also sell these parts for quick cash.
Don’t leave anything that you come across. It can be as simple as an apple or as complex as a Silver Lynel’s Horn. Be a hoarder, and you won’t regret it.
Help Koroks
In Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, weapons break—and they break a lot. You have limited inventory space for weapons and bows, which makes fighting against higher-level enemies a chore and hurts our hoarding tendencies.
This can be remedied by a simple method: Help Koroks you come across to earn Korok seeds as a reward.
These Korok seeds can be exchanged with Hestu to increase your weapons, bows, and shield inventory slots. There are a total of 1000 Korok Seeds in the game, so you don’t have to worry about finding them.
Use Shrines as Fast Travel Points
You can always activate a shrine and use it as a fast travel point without completing it. This is handy when doing a main quest and doesn’t want to divert your attention.
However, we still recommend doing Shrines as a priority so you can earn some Lights of Blessing to either increase your stamina or health.
Increase Elemental Resistance for different regions
Zelda: ToTK contains three elements that can cause harm: cold, heat, and lightning. Thankfully, the game offers several ways to battle these elements, one of which is through armor sets.
An armor set consists of three pieces. All of these pieces can be found to complete the set and get its perks. Many sets offer protection from these elements.
The Desert Voe armor set offers Heat resistance and Shock resistance. The Snowquill armor set provides Cold Resistance. The Flamebreaker armor set gives you the power to withstand lava as it is completely fireproof. The Depths armor set enables you to withstand Gloom.
Another way of combating elemental effects is through meals. Cooking is a major part of Zelda TotK. You can cook various meals that can give you powers. Some of the meals also offer resistance to these elements.
Explore Chasms
Chasms in Zelda: TotK always leads to depths, which house some unique storyline quests and optional bosses.
Want to fight a legacy dungeon boss once more? Go to the depths. Want to farm Zonaite? Depths it is. Hankering for some pristine weapons? To the depths, you go.
Chasms are marked by a red hue, which represents a gloom infestation. Whenever you see a chasm, dive into it. Don’t be afraid of the dark. There is always a Lightroot near the chasm entrance, or you can follow our guide to brighten up the depths.
Shield Surf to quickly travel downhill
Believe it or not, you can actually use your shield as a surfboard in this game if you can find a smooth, downhill slope. This feature was introduced in Zelda: BotW and has been moved to Zelda: ToTK as well.
The basics are the same as in Zelda: BotW. Start walking forward. Press the Focus (Z-Left) button. Press the Jump (X) button while in mid-air, press the Action (A) button.
Shield surfing can be done on various platforms, such as dirt, snow, grass, and even minecart rails. This is definitely a faster and more fun way to travel around Hyrule. But as with everything, consequences also affect this fun feature. Your shield degrades and loses its strength depending on the kind of terrain you’re surfing on.
The only two terrains that do not degrade your shield are dirt and snow. Every other terrain will damage it. Fusion of materials also plays a part in this feature. If you fuse a minecart to shield, you have a plain, simple skateboard. It will increase your movement speed and give you better control. Fusing a Zonai spring can allow you to have a trampoline on the go.
Break open every cracked wall you see
Cracked Rocks are a common sight in Zelda: ToTK. It would be more appropriate to call them walls, as they contain some sort of hidden passageway behind them. You are welcome to attack them in any way you like, but it is highly unlikely your weapons will hold up against the toughness.
The easiest thing you can do is to fuse a rock or boulder with any weapon, creating a rock or boulder hammer. They will be quite sturdy and inexpensive. Or you can turn to the professional way of doing this by using the Boulder Breaker.
Create minecarts to travel on Rail Tracks
Minecarts can be found anywhere you can find their rails. They are special transport vehicles that can transport anything through difficult terrain. Ideally, you should be operating these on their specified rails. But with the help of a control stick, you can change things up a bit and use it according to your own liking (on whatever terrain you prefer).
Operating these vehicles is rather easy. All you need is a Zonai Fan and a Zonai charge to operate the fan. Attach the fan to the backside of the cart. The more fans you attach, the faster the cart will move, but your Zonai charge will also be rapidly depleted.
After attaching the fan, get in the cart and whack the fan to start it. The cart will start to move under the influence of the fan.
Fast Travelling in Zelda: ToTK
Fast traveling in this game quite literally means transporting from one part of the map to another. But you cannot just fast-travel to any location on the map. You first need to unlock checkpoints on the map. As Hyrule has three regions, each region has different checkpoints. In the sky region, you have shrines for fast travel. On the surface, shrines and Skyview towers are present as checkpoints.
However, in the Depths, it is a completely different ball game. Special structures called lightroots light up the surrounding area, serving as fast travel points in the Depths of Hyrule.
Be mindful of different Weather Conditions
Weather in Zelda: TotK also plays a vital role in your survival. For example, you cannot light a fire in the open if it is raining. The slopes become slippery, making it harder for enemies to detect you. If it’s a thunderstorm and you make the mistake of using metal weapons out in the open, there is a good chance you will get struck by lightning.
The weather changes every 3 hours (3 minutes in real life) according to in-game time. If you do not wish to explore during your unfavorable conditions, you can wait until the weather changes. There is no hack or something else that will work. However, you can always sit by a bonfire or stay at an inn to fast-forward in-game time.
Tame wild horses to quickly travel around
Taming a wild horse is not so hard for the veterans of the Zelda franchise. All you need to do is find their group. Sneak up on them or go towards them gently; otherwise, you will just spook the horse. Once spooked, it will be harder to tame it as it will just run away continuously.
Approach the horse with fruit in your hand and gently follow it until it accepts the treat. It will be tamed. You can also try the soothing technique. Mount the horse in any way you can and match the L-button on your controller to soothe the horse.
One more important thing is to always register your horse at a nearby stable. Otherwise, you will lose the horse if you decide to fast travel or go anywhere distant.
Protect yourself in Thunderstorms
Thunderstorms are notorious in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and can seriously hamper your exploration. First, remove any metal-based equipment you have, either in your hand or on your body. Having metal on you during a thunderstorm invites lightning.
Secondly, take shelter inside because without using metal, you can still get randomly struck by lightning. Pass the in-game time to pass the storm.
But if you find yourself stuck in open fields with no shelter and surrounded by enemies, throw any metal object at them and become the god of thunder. Lightning will rain down on them, causing significant damage.
How to Pass In-Game Time
In-game can be passed through a few methods. You can either choose to sit near a bonfire. Sitting by a bonfire will allow you to choose the timings of the day, e.g., dawn, morning, noon, dusk, etc. You can also choose to stay at an inn. However, the stay at any inn isn’t free and will cost you game money.
Know how to climb efficiently
Climbing is a major part of exploration. Climbing efficiently requires a few things. You can try the Sticky Elixir, which enhances your climbing ability by reducing the slippiness of a surface. Or you can try wearing the Climber’s Armor set. This set allows you to increase your climbing speed and friction.
