Npcs

The people and creatures gathered in this part of the wiki have nothing obvious in common. One is a merchant with a balloon on his back, one is a cult of assassins, one is an oversized horse and one is a ranked list of things that will kill you. What connects them is that every single one wants paying, and none of them takes rupees.

So the useful question is not who they are but what they charge, and more importantly whether you can get the same thing anywhere else. On that measure they sort cleanly, from a shopkeeper whose entire catalogue is exclusive down to a fight you can simply choose not to have.

The bill for each one

Kilton runs the only shop money cannot rush

Every other vendor in Hyrule takes rupees and hands the goods over the moment you can afford them. Kilton does neither. He deals in Mon, a currency that exists solely to be spent at his own stall, earned solely by handing him monster parts, and worth nothing anywhere else in the game. If you have never met him, you will not find him by accident: he keeps night hours, and the first meeting has to happen out in Deep Akkala, on the island in the skull-shaped lake that forms its left eye. After that conversation he starts turning up on the edges of Kakariko, Hateno, Tarrey Town, Zora's Domain, Rito Village, Lurelin and Gerudo Town, still only after dark, still recognisable by the balloon.

The part that makes his shop unusual is the second price tag. Several items have a Divine Beast requirement stapled to the Mon cost, and no amount of grinding gets around it. The Lizalfos Mask stays behind the counter until two beasts are free, the Lynel Mask until three, and the whole Dark set until all four are done. That makes Kilton the one merchant whose shelves are unlocked by story progress rather than by wealth.

Add the column up and clearing his entire stock comes to 6,508 Mon, of which the Dark set is 3,997 on its own and cannot be touched before the last Divine Beast is done. Working out how much monster hunting that represents is sobering: an Octo Balloon is worth a single Mon and a Bokoblin Horn three, so the low end of his exchange rate would take thousands of kills. The top of his buying list is where the money actually is, with a Lynel Guts or a Giant Ancient Core fetching 100, a Shard of Dragon's Fang 110 and a Shard of Dragon's Horn 150. Our full Kilton guide carries both price lists in full.

The Yiga charge in fruit and pay in weather

The Karusa Valley hideout is the only place in the game where the correct answer to an armed guard is produce. Yiga Blademasters patrolling the corridors will abandon a search to go and eat a banana left on the floor, which turns what looks like a combat gauntlet into a stealth puzzle with a shopping list.

What is at the end of it is the Thunder Helm, and there is nowhere else to get one. Master Kohga guards it and, for a boss, asks remarkably little of you: he throws boulders, and returning one with Magnesis or shooting it out of the air does most of the work. Our Yiga Clan guide covers the route in and the fight, and the bosses section explains where Kohga sits among the eight fights the game actually requires.

The Giant Horse charges stamina, once

Taming the Giant Horse out in Taobab Grassland is a straightforward transaction with an unusual currency: you pay in stamina, up front, and you had better have brought enough. Soothing it takes more than two complete wheels, so this is a job for after you have traded a few Spirit Orbs the green way rather than a first-week detour. Approach badly and it bolts, so a stealth meal or stealth gear is worth having on.

What you get is genuinely unlike any other mount: five stars of strength, stamina that never runs out, and a flat two out of five for speed, which is the trade. It is a battering ram, not a racehorse. The easiest approach is a glide down off Mount Faloraa from the Owa Daim Shrine, and it is not truly yours until it is registered at Highland Stable, which is a long ride away on a slow animal. If you would rather have speed, our best horses guide ranks the alternatives, and horse gear covers the saddles and bridles, including the two Kilton sells.

The monsters charge in broken weapons

Our ranking of the five strongest monsters is worth reading with one thing in mind: it is sorted by how hard each one is to fight, not by how much health it has, and the two orders disagree. A Silver Lynel tops both at 5,000 health. But the Guardian Scout IV sits above the Guardian Stalker on difficulty while carrying twice the Stalker's health bar, at 3,000 against 1,500, and the Electric Lizalfos is ranked fourth on 288. The gap is space. A Stalker in open country can be circled on horseback until it overheats; a Scout IV is bolted into a shrine room with nowhere to run, and the Lizalfos is a nuisance mostly because it makes you drop what you are holding.

There is also a rule buried in two separate entries that is easy to miss and expensive to learn the hard way. An Ancient Arrow will delete an Electric Lizalfos or a Silver Lynel outright, and it takes the drops with it. If you are farming rather than clearing, that arrow is the most costly thing in your quiver.

The bucket is a closed loop

Read together, these four pages describe a small economy that feeds itself. The monsters drop the parts. The parts are the only thing Kilton accepts. What Kilton sells back includes the masks that let you walk past those same monsters unchallenged, which is the tidiest joke in the game's design and a genuinely practical route through the field if you would rather not fight anything at all.

For what the parts are worth outside Kilton's stall, see the items section, and the wiki hub for where all this sits in a normal playthrough.