Boarded Horsey at the stables, transported to Kakariko and restocked on fairies. Then transported to Hateno, sold off a bunch of forage loot and had about 900 rupees. Bought 15 arrows, then went to the house to spend the rest on upgrades. Bought the Bed and trees and flowers for the exterior. I figure these are the biggest bang-for-buck purchases right now, as they’ll give me the ability to sleep without having to pay for a night’s rest in the inn, and will provide me with apples and flowers that I can sell for more rupees to buy other stuff, and I can harvest any time I come home. I still have a lot of left over rupees, so I shell out for lighting, and another weapon display, bow display, and shield display
I also buy a door, but I don’t see any new door on the house. WTF? Also, there’s a small shed on the side of the house, but the door seems to be non-functional. I thought that sort of thing went out of style in the early 2000s.
Bolson the house builder seems to be kinda gay/effeminate, and I’m not having a problem with it, but I’m curious how people feel about the character’s depiction. It doesn’t seem to be a negative portrayal, but maybe a bit stereotyped.
After I spend all my money, I got to cook more dishes with my huge stockpile of forage materials, and discover that my food inventory is full. Further, each cooked dish takes up a slot. You don’t get a slot with a number counter on it, so you can carry a bajillion of a prepared meal; you get one slot per meal. There are certain exceptions: seared steak and baked apples do get a counter, but they don’t heal a lot of health, either.
I can’t cook new experimental recipes if I don’t have empty slots, so finally it’s time to start using some of this stuff.
I decide to head north of Hetano village and explore the cold mountain. It’s a long trek, and I encounter enemies that are stronger than the ones I often run into. Wolves, who can be killed for meat, but fight pretty hard, and take a lot of damage, and frost lizard dudes, who are very dangerous: fast, high hit points, high damage output, they can spit, and they have a tongue attack that has a lot of range. I get through them but break all my good weapons on the way up the mountain.
It’s too cold for me even with my warm doublet equipped, but that’s OK, I have a lot of cold-resist boosting meals packed. I find the best way to make use of these is to wait until my health is nearly depleted from cold damage, then eat the meal. It restores my health bar, plus gives me several minutes of cold resistance, which together add up to a significant amount of time to explore and look around. It’s dangeorus to let the health meter go down, but if I don’t do it, the heart replenishment that the meals provide is wasted, and the cold damage drains your health so slowly that you can get an extra few minutes out of your life bar. It’s really only a bad thing if you run into monsters unexpectedly, but encounters up here are somewhat rare, thankfully.
Still, the fights I do get into end up wrecking all of my good weapons, leaving me with just my slow axe and sledge hammer, my torch, my korok leaf, and the rest is piddly weak weapons that break quickly and are barely any use at all. The stuff I pick up from the enemies I kill is inferior to what I brought in, doing less damage as well as being less durable. Plus, many of the monsters I run into here are not carrying weapons, but use natural fangs and claws, making the weapon drops that much less frequent.
I do manage to make it all the way to the peak of the mountain, where I encounter a sick-looking, lethargic dragon-like creature, I think one of the four legendary beasts. (Edit: wrong again!) At a place called the Spring of Wisdom on the map, I trigger a story event, but it doesn’t clue me in to what I need to do. I’m puzzled, I only have limited time, and I probably don’t have the capability to whatever I need to do here, and most likely need to quest for whatever and then come back.
I take the opportunity to scope around from the new vantage point at the mountain’s absolute pinnacle. Further north, I can see numerous shrines and towers, but they’re all very far off in the distance. With enough stamina, I’m pretty sure I could hang glide all the way to the nearest of them, based on the altitude I’m at. I give this a try, but I run out of stamina before I make it over a river, fall to my death, and drown. I retry this several times to make sure, but it seems impossible. Although, if I boosted my stamina meter 1-2 more times, or used elixirs, I’m pretty sure I could do it.
Instead, I go west, down the mountain ridge, staying at the top, and continue to survey the lands. I’m basically following a route that parallels the road I walked along to find the first memory point that I discovered a few days ago, but at maximum altitude, and a bit north. I’m so high up that it’s not possible to see much detail on the ground down below, but what I lack in detail I make up for in range, and it seems like I can see halfway to the ends of the map in any direction.
While I’m up here, I find a few korok seeds and a lot of mineral deposits, and collect as much as I can find. I’m going downhill, and by the time I get to a point where I’m about longitudinally in line with the big waterfall where the hidden shrine was in the river road valley, I believe I can glide down to the north and get pretty close to a tower that I haven’t yet climbed and activated. If so, that will open up a new map region for me, as well as give me a new teleportation spot.
I glide in, and don’t get quite as far as I hoped, running low on stamina long before I run out of altitude, so I have to land far shorter of where I hoped, but I do make it down to a level where I can see a column of smoke rising from a nearby cluster of trees near a clearing. I decide to check it out, and creep up, not sure whether to expect friend or foe. It turns out to be a man, and I talk to him. He’s a traveler, trying to get north but unable to cross the river, as it’s too wide to safely swim across. It’s not far from his camp, so I head up that way to check it out. I have enough elevation that I think I can make it the rest of the way, and from there if I’m lucky I can get to the base of the tower on foot.
I glide in, and just do make it to the edge of a shallow area of the river where I can stand and not drown. There’s a few monsters nearby but fortunately none in my immediate vicinity. I sneak around and avoid most of them, and make my way toward the base of the tower, which involves some climbing. Moblins, bokoblins, and lizalfos are thick in this area, but I’m able to thread my way through them, stealthily, and avoid nearly all of them. There’s one bokoblin who I have to fight my way past just before I reach the base of the tower. I knock him down, and he tumbles away down hill a bit, dropping his weapon. I could finish him off, but I’m very low on weapons at this point, and the longer I’m there, and the more I move about, the more likely I am to attract more unwanted attention, so I use that as an opportunity to make a run for it, and I get to a tall ladder that runs up to a platform, which has a narrow bridge to where the base of the tower is. I get up there safely, and make my way to the tower, and have an easy, uneventful climb, thankfully.
At the top of the tower, I find a Zora man, who has climbed the tower and is now stuck there, unable to climb down. He tells me the Prince of the Zora is waiting for him down at the bottom, and he’s up here waiting to meet a warrior of Hylian descent, which we both think is probably me. He asks me to go down to meet the Prince and talk to him and to save Hyrule from Ganon.
I go down there and there’s a shrine nearby, so I decide to try to clear it, first. I get in, and it’s another combat trial. This one is probably easy enough that I could have cleared it, if I were fully equipped with the best weapons I’ve found so far — maybe. But right now I’m weak and depleted, and there’s just no way.
I give up and decide that in order to be of any use in this area, I’m going to need to get re-armed, so I teleport back to Kakariko village to refill on fairies again, and then back to Hateno, intending to run out to where I found all those very nice swords in that large bokoblin camp to the south along the coast.
I end up getting very sidetracked, though, and rather than take the same route as I had on my first run out that way, which was to climb to the highest point of the mountain behind my house and glide as far as I could, I end up going on foot along the roads, so I can explore more. This is fairly rewarding, but also wastes a lot of time accomplishing very little. I do find another half dozen or more korok seeds, and bring my total up to something close to 40. If and when I ever see Hestu again, I’m going to be able to max out my carrying capacity, I hope.
I find the ruins of what was once a horse riding course, and although I don’t have a horse with me on this trip, I walk the trail and find numerous targets set up around, so I shoot them all with the bow, and am rewarded with one of the korok seeds. I also run into a few bokoblins and moblins, and mostly take them out without too much trouble, although it is tougher with the weak armaments I’m carrying, and I end up breaking my last decent weapon, and now am stuck with boko spears and clubs for the most part. I wonder how on earth I’m going to be able to defeat any bokoblins to be able to get one of those nice knight’s broadswords, and I really want to get 5 or 6 of them.
I never end up making quite out there, though. I continue in a south-westerly direction along the road, and find an area that is called the navel of something or other on the map. It’s a deeply recessed lake, where I find the usual korok seed, forage items, fish, and minerals. It’s a beautiful little spot, and I’d love to spend time in a place like that in real life. I clear it and move on.
Further along the road I run into more and more bokoblins and moblins. There’s a lot of them around, but they’re not terribly difficult to fight. I try to do so as indirectly as possible to conserve what little weapons I have. But it’s useless, as I keep also running into more Keese and Chu chus, who don’t drop weapons, but do wear out my shitty boko spears and clubs quickly. At night I also run into bokoblin skeletons, and have to kill them, and swap out my worn out weapons for their severed arms or occasionally a shitty spear.
I take a fork in the road and come to a natural stone archway, and can tell there’s an ambush waiting for me ahead. Rather than go through the tunnel, I climb over it, and sure enough there’s a couple of bokoblins on the other side. They don’t see me, and I rain bombs on them until they’re all dead, loot the area, go back through the tunnel and clear mineral deposits, fight a bunch more chu chus and boko skeletons, and move on.
I get close to the mountain ridge along the west coast and start climbing. I end up getting lost, wander around a bit, explore, and find more korok seeds, a few mountain lakes, and two more caves. The first cave is a dead end, but is loaded with mineral deposits. The second cave is a tunnel to a new part of the map that I haven’t been to, but have peered down into before; it looks tropical and swampy.
Passing through the tunnel I get assaulted by a gang of lightning Kees, who surround me, disarm me through shocking me, and I don’t last long against them. On my second attempt through, I take them out at distance with my bow, and don’t take any damage from the first 5, but don’t notice a 6th until I’m deep in the cave harvesting dead Kees parts, when one sneaks up on me and hits me 3 times before I can finally stop it.
My shrine sensor is pinging off the chart at a point about mid-way through the cave, but no matter where I look I can’t find the shrine. I spend about an hour trying to triangulate it, but it’s no good. I walk in a direction, the pings get faster and louder, then fade and stop. I turn around and walk back through the exact same area, and nothing. I turn around and walk back through again, same thing happens, it pings loud and fast and then fades and stops. I don’t see anything inside the cave, I climb on top of the mountain that the cave tunnels through, and it pings like mad up there, too, but I still don’t see anything. I spend at least two if not three day-night cycles up there looking for the damn shrine, but I never do find it. On one of the nights, the great dragon beast that I has seen near the Great Plateau makes an appearance, emerging out of a lake at the base of the mountain and flying about in the night sky.
Battery on the Switch has worn down to 25% at this point, so I decide it’s time to stop for now.