Breath of the Wild (BoTW) is a huge game, full of exploration, experimentation and mystery. Like no Zelda title has for decades, it eschews handholding and tutorials in favour of encouraging players to find out how the systems work in their own right.
That can be magical when it works, but if you want to go into the game a bit more prepared, here’s a few of the most useful things to know when setting out to explore Hyrule.
Growth
While weapons and shields are impermanent, and the vast majority of skills Link receives are granted in the first two hours, there are still a number of avenues for character growth. The order you approach areas does matter, and you can make BotW easier or harder as you see fit – or even make it borderline impossible, skipping most of the game entirely and making a beeline to the final boss armed only with a sword and four hearts.
The first choice you’ll have to make is whether to upgrade your hearts or stamina bar. While more stamina is good, and can open up new areas of the map, until you have a good sense of what you need, go for hearts every time. The big reason for that is how easy it is to recover each status: if you don’t have enough hearts, it’s very possible to lose them all at once from a big enough hit, with no time to eat a meal for its healing effects.
Stamina, on the other hand, always drops steadily. If you really need to climb a gigantic cliff, you have the option of pausing the game just as you’re about to fall off, eating a stamina-recovering meal, and continuing upwards.
You’ll get a second tranche of permanent upgrades as you set about finding the divine beasts that form the game’s main questline. All of these are significant improvements to Link’s combat prowess, which means if you’re juggling whether to tackle a divine beast before or after some exploration, it’s useful to take out the big thing first, giving you the power boost.
A third source of permanent upgrades can be secured from the Ancient Tech labs in the east of Hyrule, using the items dropped by Guardians and found in Shrines. You can boost a bunch of your Sheikah Slate runes, as well as buy some less-permanent, but extremely powerful, weapons.
Finally, don’t discount the value of just buying armour. If you’re used to open-world RPGs, you may dismiss the armour for sale in shops as inferior to that which you’ll get in chests and loot drops, but that’s often not the case – and even if it is, there’s no guarantee you’ll find the right loot drop at the right time. If you need fire resistance right now, and have two thousand rupees, why not just buy the right hat?
Combat and weapons
The combat mechanics are the most documented in BotW, with most of the game’s tutorial text devoted to teaching you how to use each of your weapons and abilities. But there’s still a lot you don’t get told.
Elemental powers will be key to defeating some of the game’s harder enemies. Ice-infused weapons and arrows will freeze monsters solid, giving you a few seconds to reposition yourself, but more importantly allowing you to do a load more damage if you hit them again before the ice thaws, shattering it. Thunder has a similar paralysing effect, without the extra damage that you can deal at the end – but to make up for it, it can cause enemies to drop their weapons entirely. Fire is less useful, having no direct effects on combat, but letting you explode flaming barrels, and instantly kill icy enemies.
Don’t get too obsessed by the simple strength value of each weapon. For one thing, it doesn’t reflect the damage per second you can do – a strong weapon like Boulder Breaker does a lot of damage per swing, but it won’t kill enemies as fast as a good spear, which can hit four times for every one that the breaker does.
Similarly, remember that there are many more differences in weapons than just their strength and type. On top of the weapon itself – light and heavy swords, spears, boomerangs, hammers and more – there’s also material to bear in mind (wooden weapons catch fire, while metal ones can be struck by lightning and make sparks when they hit flint) as well as whether they’re sharp or blunt (the former can cut down trees, the latter can smash open ore deposits).
Cooking
BotW’s crafting mechanics can be vaguely daunting at the start. The game gives no tutorial at all, not even telling you the interface commands to cook dishes with more than one ingredient, and even once you work those out, you’ll likely make more than a few disgusting meals before you catch your groove.
How to cook is simple. While you can “bake” or “toast” ingredients by just dropping them on an open fire – useful for eking an extra quarter heart out of apples and mushrooms, and rendering acorns palatable – to make more complex meals you’ll need to find a cooking pot. There’s one by the Old Man’s shack on the Great Plateau, but you’ll find many more dotted around Hyrule.
Once there, open your + menu and go to the materials tab of your inventory, hit X to get the game into Hold mode, and then press A to hold up to five ingredients. Once you’re happy, close the inventory menu, and walk up to the cooking pot. Press A again to cook, sit back, and see what you’ve made! If you’re particularly lucky, you might hear a musical version of the cooking sound effect, which signifies a sort of “critical hit”; the resulting meal will give even more hearts than normal.
The lack of a recipe book might put you off experimentation, but the rules are actually quite simple, particularly for food.
The key thing to know is that you can never mix effects: besides healing you, each meal can only ever impart one effect, be that haste, stealth, thunder resistance or protection from cold weather. Don’t get greedy and chuck multiple status-imparting things in the pan! At best, you’ll waste half the ingredients; at worst, you’ll get a horrible mess that heals few hearts and gives no status boosts whatsoever.
It’s also worth experimenting with cooking the same meal in different quantities. While some items will only give longer effects for cooking more at the same time, others will bump the strength of the effect up a tier. Depending on where you’re heading, both of those can be useful: if you’re exploring an area full of Moblins, for instance, you might want one meal to give you 12 minutes of boosted defence, but if you’re taking on a combat trial, you’d probably prefer your defence to be tripled for just a couple of minutes.
While there’s no cookbook, you can still check the ingredients used in any given recipe. That’s useful if you have to make something that you can buy in a shop, like a few of the elixirs you’ll need to access some of the more punishing environments. But don’t think that just because the shop-bought version contained a particular set of ingredients, that’s the only way to make the item.
Shrines
There’s obviously fewer tips to give for shrines, since these gigantic puzzle-boxes are largely standalone. But there are some tidbits that are still good to know.
Always arrive at a shrine with a full complement of arrows. Most things you need will be given to you in the shrine – if you have to smash a rock across the map, for instance, there’ll probably be a sledgehammer nearby – but arrows seem to be the exception. You don’t want to get almost to the end then run out of projectiles, and there are a lot of puzzles that you can’t solve without arrows. Worst case scenario, you can sometimes throw your sword at the target.
If you’ve beaten a divine beast, don’t try to rely on the new powers you’ve been given. They don’t work inside Shrines. Don’t discover this the way I did: by losing a gruelling combat 95% of the way to completion.
Try and grab every chest if you can. The vast majority of them will be disappointing, but there are items contained in them which you won’t be able to get elsewhere for a very long time. I still use my Climbing Bandana most sessions, for instance.
And the rest
If it’s raining, don’t try to climb a wall. Firstly, check the weather chart in the bottom right – if it shows all rain, there may be a story reason for that, which means the weather won’t clear up until you change things. If the weather symbols are variable, though, find a dry spot, make a fire (drop some wood, drop a flint, equip a metal weapon and strike the flint), and sit by it for a few hours. Voila! Drier weather.
If you’re near water or swamp, try ducking into the Magnesis rune: there’s often a metal treasure chest hidden there for you to pull out with your magic powers.
Don’t try and catch the blue bunny. Try and shoot it instead. I know, I don’t like that any more than you do. Poor bunny.
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