Zelda Breath Of The Wild

Here is the strangest thing about Breath of the Wild, and the reason we have organised this wiki the way we have. By the time you step off the Great Plateau, perhaps an hour into a hundred-hour game, Link already has every single ability he is ever going to have. The four runes are on the slate. The paraglider is on his back. Nothing waiting out in Hyrule will teach him a new move, hand him a grappling hook, or unlock a door that a better item would have opened.

What the rest of the game gives you is more. More hearts, more stamina, more pockets, more map. The verbs are fixed on day one and the numbers climb for the next hundred hours, which means almost every decision you make out there is about which number to raise next and what it costs. That is the question this hub is built to answer.

What you walk off the Plateau carrying

The tutorial region is not really a tutorial. It is the complete toolkit, handed over in four shrines. Magnesis to pull metal, remote bombs in two shapes, Stasis to hold a moving thing still, and Cryonis to raise ice out of water. Finish those four and the Old Man drops the disguise, admits to having ruled this kingdom once, and trades you the paraglider for the trouble.

Our Great Plateau walkthrough covers that opening, and if you are entirely new, start with our beginner's guide. The camera arrives later from Purah at the Hateno lab, and the Master Cycle Zero only turns up once you have worked through the Champions' Ballad, but those are additions to a set that is otherwise complete before you have met anybody.

The numbers that climb, and what each one costs

Two of those deserve a warning label. Korok seeds are the biggest collection in the game at 900, but only 441 of them buy anything: past that point you are collecting for a keepsake. And the Great Fairy fees escalate whichever order you wake them in, so the 10,000 rupee bill is always coming, it is only a question of which fountain it lands at.

Shrines, which are the engine of all of it

Nearly half of this wiki is shrines, and that is the right proportion, because a shrine is simultaneously a puzzle, a permanent fast-travel point and a quarter of a heart. Our shrines guide covers the 88 we have pages for and groups them by something more useful than their coordinates: whether the trial is waiting inside the room or has quietly already begun somewhere out in the hills. Two dozen of them cannot be found at all until you have finished something else first, which is where most of the lost afternoons come from.

It also handles the three Lomei Labyrinths and Vah Ruta, the closest this game gets to a dungeon in the old sense. Anyone chasing the completion percentage should read our 100 percent completion guide first, because the figure counts fewer things than most players assume.

Quests, from the ones that reshape the map to the ones about chickens

There are 76 side quests and a main story, and the journal gives you no help ranking them. Our quests guide ranks them by durability of the reward, since some of them add a permanent feature to your Hyrule and others hand you 300 rupees and a nice view. The four regional storylines sit near the top of that ranking, and not for narrative reasons: each Divine Beast you liberate takes a measurable bite out of Calamity Ganon's health bar before the final fight starts.

Our page on the game's major characters is worth reading alongside it, since the Champions are the reason most of those quests exist.

Fighting, and how much of it you can avoid

The bosses guide sorts the game's eight compulsory fights by how much preparation actually changes them, which varies enormously: one of them can be made half as long by work done elsewhere, and another is identical no matter when you meet it.

For everything you carry into those fights, our weapons guide ranks the arsenal by how hard the game makes it to obtain in the first place, which is the honest way to compare a sword you need thirteen hearts to draw against a blade you take off a Lizalfos. The armor guide asks a different question, namely which sets exist to keep you alive in a specific region and which merely make you better at fighting. If you want the short version, our best armor rankings cut to what we would actually wear.

Materials, cooking and everything you pick up

Our items guide is arranged around a single practical question: when does another one turn up? Hyrule replaces almost everything, on schedules ranging from nightly to whenever the Blood Moon rises, and the handful of objects that genuinely exist once are all permanent unlocks rather than materials. Knowing which is which is the difference between hoarding and playing.

Cooking is where most of it ends up, and our best cooking recipes covers the meals worth memorising. When the fairies start asking for four figures, our rupee farming guide is the fastest way to find it.

Systems, places and the people who want paying

The mechanics guide covers everything from the heart and stamina exchange down to shield surfing, ordered by whether the system changes your save permanently or just entertains you for an afternoon. Both kinds are worth your time; only one kind is worth your time early.

The locations guide deals with the short list of places where arriving is itself the achievement, chiefly the towers that paint in your map and the fairy fountains that raise your armor ceiling. The NPCs guide covers the handful of characters and creatures who will trade with you, none of whom accept rupees, including a merchant who runs the only shop in Hyrule that money alone cannot open.

Horses get their own pages: our best horses guide for finding a good one, and how to revive a horse for the day it goes wrong.

When you have finished

The story ends and Hyrule carries on regardless, which is what our roundup of things worth doing afterwards is for. Our cheats, secrets and exploits page collects the tricks the game does not advertise, and on PC our best mods roundup covers what the community has added, including the multiplayer mod that a group of modders set out to build.

How this game got made, and how it landed

Breath of the Wild arrived with a lot of argument attached, and a few of our older pieces from that period are still the most interesting things written about it. Monolith Soft's contribution to the open world is the one most people underestimate, and Skyward Sword's Hidemaro Fujibayashi taking the director's chair was the first real signal of how different this entry would be.

The size of the map was argued about for months before release, and our map size comparison is a useful corrective to the wilder claims of the time. When the first reviews landed the argument stopped fairly quickly. And for anyone who remembers how long the wait felt, we covered the producer warning that the sequel was a long way off, which turned out to be true.