Dungeons

Every guide to Breath of the Wild's shrines is a map. Search for them and you get maps, map screenshots, and lists of coordinates arranged by region, which is a reasonable thing to want and also exactly what the game already gives you the moment you climb a tower. We have written this one the other way round, because a map answers where a shrine is and almost never answers the question that actually stops people: what is the trial, and has it already started?

Because in a surprising number of cases it has. A shrine is not always a building you walk into and solve. Sometimes the building will not appear until you have done something out in the weather, and sometimes the thing you do out in the weather is the whole puzzle and the room behind the door is a formality. So the shrines below are ordered by how far outside their own front door the trial begins.

The four distances, counted

We cover 88 shrines here, alongside a page for the three Lomei Labyrinths and one for Divine Beast Vah Ruta. Sorted by where the trial starts, they fall out like this.

Those add up to more than 88 because five shrines are in two categories at once: they are hidden behind an outdoor quest and then hold a fight when you finally get in. Katah Chuki, Saas Ko'sah, Sasa Kai, Sharo Lun and Tutsuwa Nima are the ones that make you work twice.

One number worth stating plainly, since it is the first thing people ask: the base game has 120 shrines and the Champions' Ballad adds 16 more, for 136 in total. We do not have a page for every one of them yet, so treat this as the 88 we can walk you through rather than a complete atlas.

Why any of this matters more than location

Four Spirit Orbs make one heart or one stamina vessel, and a shrine hands over exactly one orb no matter which of the categories above it belongs to. That flat rate is the whole reason to care about difficulty: a Test of Strength against a Guardian Scout IV and a shrine where you tip a ball into a hole pay identically. Our health and stamina guide covers the exchange itself.

The second reason is travel. A shrine entrance becomes a warp point the moment you reach it, whether or not you go inside. Finding one and leaving it unsolved is still worth the walk, which is a strategy the game never suggests to you.

The 55 you can simply walk into

Most shrines are honest about themselves. The orange glow is visible from a ridge, the door is open, and everything the trial asks of you happens in one room. Magnesis is the most common answer by a distance, with Stasis, Cryonis and remote bombs behind it, and a large number of them are really physics problems dressed as puzzles: wind and updrafts to glide across, balls to roll, platforms to tilt, torches to carry.

Four of those are where everybody starts. Oman Au hands over Magnesis, Owa Daim gives Stasis, and along with Ja Baij and Keh Namut they are the four the Old Man wants finished before he will part with the Paraglider. Our Great Plateau walkthrough covers that opening sequence, and the runes guide covers what each tool does once you have it.

If you want one thing to have ready before walking into an unknown shrine in this tier, make it Magnesis. Reading back through our walkthroughs it is called for more often than any of the other three runes, usually to drag a metal slab into place as a bridge, a lid or a counterweight. Stasis is the next most useful and is the answer whenever something is moving faster than you would like, Cryonis matters only where there is water, and a remote bomb is what the game expects when a wall or a pile of blocks is in the way. A torch and something to light it with is worth a slot too, since several of these rooms are dark and a couple want you to carry a flame from one place to another.

The 16 where the trial is a fight

A Test of Strength has no puzzle in it. The door opens, a Guardian Scout unfolds itself, and the trial is whether you can beat it. They come in tiers, and the tier is what decides whether this is a two-minute stop or a genuine problem: our strongest monsters ranking puts the Guardian Scout IV third in the entire game, on 3,000 health, largely because a shrine room gives you nowhere to run.

The approach barely changes between them. Get behind a pillar when it spins, punish the recovery after each arm swing, and carry ancient or Guardian weapons, which do far more to these things than anything you looted off a Bokoblin. Ice arrows to interrupt the laser wind-up and fire arrows into the frozen result is the fastest route through the harder ones. They are also the best farm in the game for the parts your rune upgrades want, which our Ancient Cores guide covers, and every one of them stands back up on the next Blood Moon.

Chaas Qeta, sitting on its own island out past Hateno, is the one we would point at as the hardest of the plain fights, since it is a Major Test of Strength against a three-armed Scout with a sword, an axe and a shield. Saas Ko'sah is worse and is also buried inside Hyrule Castle, which is the kind of joke this game enjoys.

The 22 that are not on your map yet

This is the category people lose hours to, because there is nothing to find. The shrine has not risen out of the ground, so no amount of climbing towers or sweeping the Sheikah Sensor will help. Something has to happen outside first, and in most cases it is a named quest with its own page in our quests section.

The pleasure of these is that the outdoor half is where Breath of the Wild does its best writing and its most inventive puzzles. Rolling a snowball into position so that it throws a shadow across a pedestal, and only at the one hour of the day when the sun will cooperate; threading a single arrow through two aligned rock rings, following a Korok child through the Lost Woods without being spotted, setting a campfire on a platform after dark: none of that is a thing you do inside a shrine, and all of it is a shrine trial.

A few are worth calling out. Daag Chokah sits northwest of the Lost Woods and cannot be reached by walking towards it at all; the only route is The Lost Pilgrimage, which means shadowing a small Korok named Okai through the dark without being noticed, and the shrine itself asks nothing of you afterwards. Kah Yah waits at the end of A Fragmented Monument, which is a photography assignment. Shae Katha is the reward for reaching the Spring of Courage. And Bareeda Naag needs a campfire lit on a specific platform after nightfall before there is anything there to enter.

The two that are not really shrines

At the far end of the scale, the outside part stops being a preamble and becomes the whole thing.

The three Lomei Labyrinths, up in Hebra, out on an island in Akkala and down in the Gerudo Desert, are mazes large enough to be visible on the map from across a region. Each holds a shrine, chests, and Guardians patrolling the corridors, and each pays out one piece of the Barbarian Armor set, so finishing all three is the only way to complete it. The Akkala one is also where the Travel Medallion is buried, which our medallion guide covers.

Divine Beast Vah Ruta is the closest this game comes to a traditional Zelda dungeon: a machine you climb inside, rotate with the slate, and clear terminal by terminal, with Waterblight Ganon at the end of it. Getting to it is the whole Zora storyline. Our Zora's Domain walkthrough handles the approach and the Waterblight guide handles the fight.

Common questions

Are there more than 120 shrines? Yes. The base game has 120 and the Champions' Ballad adds another 16, so a fully expanded save has 136.

What happens when you finish all 120? The base game's full set earns the Armor of the Wild, which is worth having for its own sake and, once it is fully upgraded, strengthens the beam the Master Sword fires at full health.

What is the easiest shrine? Any of the ones in the third table above where the room turns out to be empty. Daag Chokah and Raqa Zunzo both make you work hard outdoors and then hand over the orb without asking anything else, so if you have already finished the quest, they are free.

Do I need to solve a shrine to get the warp point? No. Reaching the entrance is enough, so on a long overland trip it is worth touching every shrine you pass even if you have no intention of going in.

Where to go from here

Orbs turn into hearts and stamina in the mechanics section, the outdoor halves of the quest-gated shrines live in quests, and what the Guardian Scouts drop is dealt with in items. If you are working towards a full clear, our 100 percent completion guide sets out what the game actually counts, and the wiki hub has the running order we would follow.