Maybe Hyrule is a Discworld-esque flat map that rotates every couple of years and they’re now in the phase where the “map” is rotated by 180 degrees? =P

…joke aside, I’ve heard three theories about this that make a bit of sense:

1. The first setup was an accident and it was actually meant to be like in TotK right from the start, so the devs merely corrected their mistake.

2. The swap was done to make locations feel “off” and new, even the parts that weren’t actually changed much (like for example the Sanidin Park Ruins).

3. The swap was done to make the desert part easier, since now the Gerudo Highlands provide a lot of shade while the sun is north. It is already difficult enough to navigate in the Gibdo-infested sandstorm even if you’re not currently boiling to death, so the devs granted players a bit of mercy here.

None of these are in any way confirmed tho - they’re just fan theories.

The original “project” in BotW took a while to accomplish, especially since I also wanted to find out what time of the day the pictures were taken (so the shadows would be identical), and I did it more or less blind so finding the right spot wasn’t always easy either (I had the most trouble with the Eldin Canyon and Nameless Forest pictures). Took a good month of trial and error back then.

Since the locations haven’t changed between games, the “requirement” to get the weather AND time right no longer applies, and the fact that I know the BotW map by heart after playing basically nothing else for 6 years straight, the TotK version was a lot easier. Took me about a week, including the video version ;)

That must have taken ages, wow … I admire your dedication ♪

I just went into this blind

Those are the best challenges anyway. Half of the fun comes from encountering problems you didn’t expect, and coming up with a solution to conquer them. Always feels a lot more rewarding than just following a script ;)

That’s seriously impressive! Did you swim all the way through the ocean with a single stamina wheel? Oder did you ride a raft?

Immediatly after the cutscene, you can still pick up the rock. If you revisit the location later, the circle will be completed and the rocks can no longer be picked up, but the Korok will be still present. I guess it’s some sort of safety measure so the player can’t just repeatedly solve the same puzzle.

Shipping fictional characters in itself is completely fine with me. It can be nice to spin your own stories out of availiable canon material, and even nicer if future canon material also supports the ideas that have been spun, like in this case here. There is no harm in that. Fanfictions, artworks, tin foil hat theories, headcanon of any kind - 100% fine with me.

However, I fully agree about “ship wars” not being worth it in any way. It takes zero effort and no energy whatsoever to just chill and let people enjoy stuff they like even if it’s not your cup of tea, instead of going apesh*t aggressive when someone has a different view on things. Never understood the motivation behind this senseless hostility to make others miserable for no reason.

For example, I personally like the idea that there is no romantic interest whatsoever between Zelda and Link, and that they’re just very close friends that fully trust each other. The idea that those two have a crush on each other … nope. Don’t like it, won’t incorporate the idea into my own headcanon, ever. But that does not mean that I have the desire and/or right to tell others that they are somehow “wrong” for shipping those two. I’m completely okay with others thinking differently about this topic - To each their own ;)

That’s how it always should be IMHO. Just respect and acknowledge that not everyone likes the same stuff and don’t be a prick about it. (Which is the point that people engaging in “ship wars” grossly fail to understand for some reason)

Apologies. I just downloaded the biggest version I could find and mashed the edited version and the crisp original together - the edited part is still a little blurry, but the rest of the pic has better quality now: https://i.postimg.cc/YrzZnvwS/test.jpg

(You might need to use the “download original” button in the upper left corner)

Here you go: https://i.postimg.cc/XVZLpYMG/tears-of-the-kingdom-official-wallpaper-without-logo-the-v0-tt1qgl6ii56c1.png

Someone on reddit edited the logo out (u/Kobob_KC)

Not a bug. The OP explains in the other post that they edited their heart count to open the Door of Time earlier than intended, which skips the cutscene that triggers the fourth shrine and the teleportation feature to be unlocked. You’re not supposed to be able to teleport earlier than that, so the game works as intended (even tho it sucks for the OP to be stuck that way)

Not sure why it play so much worse than the Great Plateau.

100% agreed to that point tho. It takes AGES just to get to the shrines in the first place and locking the teleport feature up until the very end of the tutorial wasn’t exactly the wisest design choice. In BotW the player can teleport as soon as there is a travel point unlocked, and story-wise it is weird that Link somehow forgot how fast travel works between the two games.

I assume this actually follows the meta for speedrunning??

Sort of, yes. As per the creator, the video is loosely based on this speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMFE1yvsZGI&t=0s

Is that not the right word? Sorry, English isn’t my first language ^^° what would have been a better word to use?

Tldr: I’m an oldish, weathered guy scared to shit by some pixels

There are dozens of us! Dozens!!!

The first time I “encountered” one of these, I didn’t even see it. It was near / under the Morok shrine (that mini floating island near the Floret Sandbar). Just as I was halfway done climbing the roots, the sky went red (during daytime), eerie music started, and I was like “Huh, seems like the Panic Blood Moon is still a thing…” and just continued climbing. It didn’t occur to me at all to look down so I missed that enemy completely. When I jumped down after activating the terminal (not doing the shrine yet) the music was normal again and I wondered what that “Dark Clump” is doing on the ground. I figured it must have been a Panic Blood Moon meteor or something? An item that fell from the blood red sky?

…so of course the next time I heard that music, I just stopped and looked upwards, determined to find that “meteor”, and almost had a heart attack when a malice-infested “Death Hand” grabbed Link from offscreen <__< … oh the joy of playing games blind and drawing dumb conclusions …

It took me almost a full playthrough before I dared to fight those things, and yes, I too used the “carpet bomb with multishot bow” approach… and then almost had a heart attack again once I saw the name above the health bar of the “follow-up” enemy, lol. The “second phase” is still easier IMHO.

…and it sounds way cooler IMHO. “Secret Stone” sounds like something a preteen would use in a short story about a superhero they just made up, or maybe a placeholder name that they never bothered to change.

I’m just going to pretend that they ARE called Sacred Stones and Hyruleans just pronounce it a bit differently.

As to why it only happened every 10000 years (if it even happened more than twice?) I’ve got no idea.

If I had to hazard a guess, the “ten thousand years” aren’t exactly 10k years in the literal sense, but instead just mean “a very very long time ago”.

I mean, if someone today says stuff like “there is a myriad of stars in the night sky” then they also do not mean that there are exactly 10k stars (because that’s the literal translation of “myriad”) but instead mean that there are too many stars to count. Maybe the same applies to BotW?

EDIT: I just checked wikipedia out of curiosity and it seems that “ten thousand” really does mean “numberless or infinite” in Japanese. I wouldn’t be surprised if Treehouse of America accidentally went with the literal translation when a metaphorical one (like saying “an eternity ago” or something similar) would have made more sense for Westeners.

“The people dismantled the sheikah tech because they didn’t want another calamity to hijack it”

This is exactly my personal headcanon, regardless of what Nintendo says. And TBH they contradict their own game with that statement, because there IS still some of the old tech left. For example, the new Skyview Towers: The terminals look almost identical to the ones in the old Sheikah Towers, and the platform that launches Link into the sky looks like a repurposed shrine travel gate. Link gets grabbed by mechanical arms/tentacles that look completely identical to Guardian legs, and they attach a cable to his belly that glows in blue and orange in the same manner (and color shade) as the glowy parts of non-posessed Guardians did (the possessed ones had a purple/pink glow, but the “hostile” shrine guardians that were controlled by the monks had an orange glow, and the non-hostile Sheikah Tech was glowing blue). And the “Purah Pad” is nothing but an upgraded and rebranded Sheikah Slate - where did Purah get that tech from? And Robbie still has his little robot “Cherry” sitting in the Hateno Tech Lab, obviously functional. AND you can still find the glowing mini daggers they formerly used as arrowheads for Ancient Arrows, which still work the same way as before (total annihilation of non-boss enemies)

That’s a lot of random coincidences for allegedly “completely disappeared” technology.

…and if they wanted the leftover Sheikah Tech to canonically have been vanished completely, they would have needed to only mention it in some in-game dialogue that the same Gloom clouds that shot out of the chasms and corrupted/decayed random weapons also deliberately attacked any Sheikah Tech that was left in the open as well, disintegrating it. Parts that had been locked away by then (like inside the Tech Labs or in locked treasure chests for example) wouldn’t have been affected if the Gloom couldn’t reach them, explaining why SOME stuff is still present.

just saying “it was magic and went poof for no particular reason” sounds lame in comparison IMHO.

EDIT/PS: also, in one of the after-credits scenes in BotW, Zelda mentions that Vah Ruta has stopped working and she wants to investigate to find out why. We still see the Divine Beasts in the background of those scenes, and IIRC that cutscene happened a few days or even weeks after Calamity Ganon has been defeated. If the tech vanished “after Calamity Ganon was sealed away” why is it still present in those scenes? It would be weird for that stuff to keep sitting around in the overwold for an extra month or so before randomly disappearing.

…as long as you don’t make the mistake of going to a Forge Construct to buy the needed Big Zonai Charges with chunks of Large Zonaite, only to realize that these, too, are needed for armor upgrades … it might or might not be a contributing factor to why I still haven’t fully upgraded the Zonaite Set. <__<

I fell off a few times, got flash-frozen by Naydra because I forgot to upgrade the Snowquill Set for immunity, but with a bit of fine tuning, it worked at least once ^^ I’m just a bit too clumsy to relieably pull it off every time, but it defo does work as advertised.

Worse: I transported it to the Gerudo Canyon Stable because that’s the only stable I know of that does not have its own ring garland, and I was a little disappointed that the guy behind the counter didn’t react to it, so I just threw it away … and then I learned about Gerudo Town and did it all again, not knowing that it needs to be fused to a shield and I wouldn’t have needed to go through this hassle twice.

No exploits, nope. I built a plane ;)

Originally I wanted to use them like wings on a plane, but that didn’t work out until I glued an actual Zonai Wing to them. And since Zonai Wings only last for a minute or so, I had to land and swap that part a couple of times during that trip … but on that save file I have way too many Zonai capsules than I need anyway.

(Before you ask; the “scythe” is a Silver Lizalfos Horn fused to a spear)