Locations

Hyrule is enormous and most of it is scenery. A handful of spots are not: you walk up to them once, press a button, and the save file is permanently different afterwards. Nothing you do later can undo it, and nothing makes you do it twice. Those are the places worth a detour, and they are what this section of the wiki covers.

We have sorted them by how much of the file each one rewrites, which runs from a single structure that gates the whole main quest down to a fairy who fixes one specific loss.

What each visit switches on

The towers, and why the first one is not like the other fourteen

There are fifteen Sheikah Towers, and our tower locations guide works through every one. Fourteen of them you can tackle in whatever order you like, as long as you can physically get to the ground beneath them. The fifteenth, standing on the Great Plateau a short walk downhill from the Temple of Time, is not optional at all: the main quest will not move forward until its terminal is lit, which makes it the only building in Hyrule that is a hard gate.

After that the towers are all the same trade. You get to the base, you climb, you touch the device on top, the tower rises, and a region appears on your slate. The difficulty is never the terminal. It is the ground floor: Woodland is wrapped in poison growth you have to climb through, Hateno is buried under thorns that want a fire arrow, the Wasteland tower sits behind water you have to freeze into stepping stones, and Lake tower is on an island with company. A Sheikah Sensor set to Tower is the cheapest way to find one in dense forest, and a paraglider from higher ground is usually easier than climbing from below.

Two towers have their own pages because they cause the most trouble. Faron Tower is a stamina problem more than a navigation one, sitting past the Sarjon Woods with a climb that punishes a half-empty wheel. Tabantha Tower has two genuinely different approaches, one reckless and one sensible, and our guide walks both.

The Great Fairies raise a ceiling, not a number

The four Great Fairies are the single best return on a detour in the game, and they are easy to misread as a shop. They are not. The rupees you hand over are a one-time fee to wake each one up, and after that she never charges admission again. What the fee actually buys is a higher upgrade ceiling that applies to armor you have not even found yet.

The fee climbs steeply, which is the only real planning decision here:

• Cotera, in the woods past Ta'loh Naeg Shrine outside Kakariko, asks 100 rupees if she is your first.
• Mija, out on a clearing in Akkala Lake near Dah Hesho Shrine, asks 500.
• Kaysa, by the Tabantha Great Bridge at Nero Hill, asks 1,000. Gliding down from the top of Tabantha Tower is the short way in.
• Tera, southeast of Gerudo City out at the Dragon's Exile by the Gerudo Great Skeleton, asks 10,000.

The order is what you choose, not the prices, since the amount is decided by how many fairies you have already woken rather than by which one you are standing in front of. The 10,000 rupee bill is coming whichever one you leave for last, so there is an argument for waking the awkward desert one late and the convenient Kakariko one first. Waking a fairy only opens the door, too. Each individual piece of armor still wants its own materials on top, which is what most of the items bucket is quietly about.

The fifth fairy, who does something else entirely

Malanya, the Great Horse Fairy, is filed with the others and belongs in a category by herself, because she upgrades nothing. She resurrects horses that died on you. You will find her at the end of the path past the Lake of the Horse God, out in the Lake Tower region. It is the only service in Hyrule that reverses something, which is worth knowing before you gallop a hard-won mount into a Lynel.

Where to go next

Towers reveal terrain but they do not mark shrines for you, and finding those is a separate job covered in our shrines guide. The rupees for the fairies have to come from somewhere, and the fastest sources are gathered in the mechanics section. For a sense of which of these detours to take first, the wiki hub lays out the order we would follow.