Items

Hyrule is unusually generous. Break every weapon you own and the world puts more on the ground. Empty an ore deposit and it fills back in. Kill every Guardian in a shrine and the next Blood Moon stands them all up again. Once you understand that, the only question that matters about any material in this game is how long you have to wait for another one.

That is how this section is arranged, from things that come back tonight to the small handful that never come back at all. It matters more than rarity does, because a genuinely rare item you can farm forever is a scheduling problem, while a common item that exists once is a decision.

The restock clock

Star fragments fall on a timetable, so treat them as one

No merchant sells a star fragment, which makes them read as rare. They are not rare, they are nocturnal. They come down every single night between roughly a quarter past nine and just before three in the morning, and the moon's phase or colour makes no difference at all, so there is no waiting for the right night.

The method in our star fragment farming guide is a small routine rather than a hunt. Warp to Shee Vaneer Shrine, climb the Dueling Peaks, and use campfires to push the clock round to nightfall. Fragments land wherever your camera happens to be pointed, so aim it out over the fields rather than the water, because anything that lands in a lake is gone on impact. Scope the burst of golden light, mark the spot, warp to the nearest shrine and walk in. The only hard deadline is dawn: a fragment left on the ground past five in the morning disappears.

They are worth 300 rupees apiece if you are short of money for a Great Fairy, they make any cooked meal restore more, and they are what the amiibo jewellery pieces want at the top of their upgrade ladders.

The Blood Moon is a restock notification

It is easy to read the Blood Moon as a punishment, since everything you cleared stands back up. Read it as a delivery instead. Our Ancient Cores guide is built on exactly this: Guardians are the reliable source, and they return with every Blood Moon, which turns a finite-looking material into an unlimited one. Inside shrines the same applies, though only the Guardian Scout III and IV variants carry cores, so a Test of Strength is worth checking which tier you are up against before committing.

There is also a chest with a core in it in the first room of Hawa Koth Shrine, sitting in the underwater channels and needing Magnesis to fish out, and the guide covers a duplication trick using the dead Guardians lying in the field for anyone who would rather not fight.

The renewable middle, which is most of this section

The bulk of what the Great Fairies want comes back on its own without you doing anything, and the pages here are really about where to stand rather than how to conserve.

• Ore comes in two grades, and our ore farming guide makes the distinction worth learning at a glance: the dark ordinary deposits carry opal and amber, while the rarer gold-flecked ones are where sapphires and rubies live.
• Gems overlap with ore and add chests to the picture. Our gems guide covers what each stone is for, and diamond farming deals with the expensive one, including trading Luminous Stones to Ledo and buying outright in Tarrey Town.
• Critters and fish are the fiddly half of every upgrade. Hightail Lizards bolt unless you crouch, Smotherwing Butterflies only live where it is dangerously hot, and Hearty Bass is the one fish worth going out of your way for.
• Mushrooms feed the whole cooking system, and our mushroom guide covers the six that actually matter, from Endura Shrooms to Sunshrooms.
• Elemental arrows can be farmed rather than bought. See fire arrows and shock arrows for the spots we go back to.

What you do with all of it is cooking, and two pages here handle that: our full recipe list for stews, roasts, seafood, desserts and elixirs, and a walkthrough for Salmon Meuniere, which is the one dish the game makes you cook to finish a quest rather than to eat.

The counted things, where the number is published and misleading

There are 900 Korok seeds in Hyrule. That is the figure everyone quotes and it is the wrong one to plan around. Our Korok seed guide states the number that actually governs your inventory: 441 seeds unlock every upgrade Hestu has to offer. The remaining 459 exist so that you can be handed Hestu's Gift, which is a keepsake and does nothing whatsoever.

So the honest advice is that half of the largest collectible hunt in the game is optional even for completionists who care about power, and only matters if you are chasing the completion percentage, where the seeds account for the overwhelming majority of it. Prices climb as your pouches grow, too, so the last few slots cost far more seeds than the first few. If you have decided to go all the way, the Korok Mask shakes on your head whenever one is near, which is the difference between a hunt and a walk.

The other counted collections are smaller and more cheerful. Horse gear is a fixed list of bridles and saddles handed out by quests, minigames and shops, including an Extravagant Saddle for getting round Blynne's obstacle course inside a minute and a half, and none of it does anything until you take it to a stable. Our secret treasure chest guide covers loot that is hidden rather than guarded, most of it behind a rune rather than a fight, and rare weapons and armor collects the one-off finds worth a detour.

The four things that never come back

This is the short list, and it is worth knowing precisely because everything else on this page is replaceable.

Giant Ancient Cores are the interesting case, because they exist in both categories at once. Enemies drop them, so those are renewable. The ones handed over for completing certain shrine trials are not: our guide says outright that you can collect each of those exactly once and they do not respawn. That makes a Giant Ancient Core from a shrine a genuinely finite object in a game that has almost none.

The Korok Mask and the Travel Medallion are one apiece, both buried at the end of a DLC rumour hunt, and both are tools rather than materials. The medallion in particular is worth the trip out to Lomei Labyrinth Island, since it plants a warp point anywhere you like, which no shrine or tower can do.

And the rune upgrades are the most permanent purchase in the game. Purah's Slated for Upgrades quest at the Hateno Ancient Tech Lab wants three Ancient Screws, three Ancient Shafts and three Ancient Cores, and hands back a bigger blast radius and a shorter cooldown on your bombs, along with improvements to the sensor and to Stasis. Nine parts, once, for the rest of the save. If you need the materials in a hurry, the fields of dead Guardians at Ash Swamp and Torin Wetland are the fastest places to look.

Where this all goes

Almost everything above ends up at a fairy fountain or a cooking pot. The armor section lists which sets want which materials, our locations guide covers waking the fairies who will take them, and the mechanics section handles cooking, inventory space and the rest of the systems these materials feed. For the fastest route to the rupees behind all of it, see our rupee farming guide or start from the wiki hub.