I am trying to save up money and wood for the house in Hateno. I am about halfway there in rupees, but only 1/3 there in wood. I figured out that if I chop trees down, once in a while it drops a wood bundle. But more often, it drops a kurok leaf, a tree branch, or an acorn, so it’s not really worth farming it by wearing down my weapons. So instead, I can blow the trees down using Sheikah slate bombs.
I don’t like to spend a lot of time doing it at once, because it becomes tedious, but eventually I’ll get there. I do feel like blasting should attract attention from much farther away than it does. Maybe not for a single explosion, but when you’re blasting away like a mining company for an hour, it should eventually attract someone to investigate what the hell is going on, be it a monster or a travelling Hyrulian.
And even if you’re in a particularly inaccessible position on the side of a mountain, probably someone should walk by and look up and see the explosions and then start stalking you, keeping an eye on you as best they can until you come down and they can talk/fight you, or you disappear out of sight. And then that should generate rumor conversations, “Our village guard is concerned about reports of numerous explosions that have been heard in the mountain nearby. Have you seen or heard anything?” “A few days ago, we could hear a strange thunder. Even though the skies were clear. Some fear the worst about what may be coming. But I think we should go up there and face whatever it is. Are you with me?”
I’ve accumulated so many materials through foraging, that I am selling off the excess and getting my rupees mostly in that fashion. Unlike the original Zelda games that I’m used to (to date, I’ve only played LoZ, ZII, Link to the Past, and Ocarina) it doesn’t seem like you earn a lot of rupees by defeating enemies. Very occasionally they’ll drop coin, but mostly what you get from them is weapons, shields, and body parts. I’ve found a few treasure chests with rupees in them, but really very few, probably just a handful so far.
I discovered that in certain areas there are glowing rabbit-like creatures, which cannot be killed (so far as I can tell) but when shot by an arrow, they drop rupees. The amount that they drop is marginally cost effective, but sometimes they don’t drop enough to cover the cost of the arrow. Due to massive inflation, arrows in 2018 Zelda games cost a whopping 5 rupees, where in 1985 they cost just 1 rupee, which was far more reasonable. So I try not to use the arrows too much, unless I need meat, or if if I’m sniping bokoblins from long distances.
I discovered that Koko, the little girl in Kakariko village has more cooking sidequests for me, and they’re all pretty easy, she just names an ingredient that I 90% guaranteed have in my inventory already, I hand it over, and she makes me a dish. They’re fun, but Koko is so hard on herself, it makes me sad.
I discovered another Kakariko sidequest, to return a villager’s 10 chickens that have escaped. They’re all over the village, and pretty easy to grab, except the last one took a really long time to find. Chickens crow like roosters when day breaks! I also discovered that you can glide by holding a chicken and using it like a glider. I did not notice that it even requires stamina to do this, which unless I just missed it, gives chicken gliding a lot of potential, assuming that you can manage to carry a chicken all the way to some high location that you can then jump off of. But since you can’t climb and carry a chicken, it’s probably not very useful at all. After I finished rounding up all the chickens, the man gave me 50 rupees for my trouble, which, honestly, for the time it took, I could have done way better just harvesting forage in the fairy pond area, probably. Then the man told me about chicken gliding, which I had already figured out in the course of completing that quest. Oh well.
North of Kakarkio, where the road ends and blends into an open meadow area, I spotted a shrine down hill aways, so I tried to glide down to it. I spotted an abandoned looking shack, and went inside, and found a few old weapons lying about, but I didn’t really need any.
I made my way from there to the shrine, and encountered some lizard men, and not wanting to get into it with them, I just ran past them and got into the shrine.
This challenge was fairly easy, although it took me some time to work out what I needed to do.
There were three orange balls floating on the water, and a large, heavy bowl sitting at the bottom of the pool. Using magnetic power, I raised the bowl out of the water and put it on dry land. Then, using ice power, I lifted the orange balls out of the water, climbed the ice pillar, grabbed the orange ball, and put it into the bowl. After putting all three balls in, I expected something to happen, but nothing did. I looked around a bit and then noticed something I had overlooked initially: a ball-switch basin, on the other side of an un-climbable wall. I figured that I needed to use the magnet power on the bowl to lift a ball into the pen where the ball-switch is, and dump it in to trigger the switch.
The hunch proved right, and it opened a doorway to a second challenge. Another switch inside a pen with unclimbable walls, but this time no bowl in the pool. But I could bring the bowl from the first room with me, so that’s what I did. I grabbed a ball, scooped it out of the water with the bowl, and threw it into the pen. Then I noticed a big floor switch in the bottom of the pool, and so I dragged the bowl over, and it was heavy enough to not only sink again, but it pushed the switch down, which drained the water, and opened up the doorway to the waiting monk. I claimed my spirit orb, but didn’t get anything else.
After I emerged, I teleported back to Kakariko, traded in my four spirit orbs for a Heart Container, tried talking to Impa for more clues about where else I could go to recover my lost memories, but didn’t get any new advice, and then traveled to Hateno village, where I spent the better part of two hours screwing around with the blue fire, trying to light all the lamps in the village to see what they do. It’s possible I missed one, but I don’t think I did, and after lighting all of them that I could find, nothing else special happened. A bit of a letdown. I had to sit through two rainstorms to find that out, too.
Hateno has a lot more buildings and people in it that I haven’t properly explored yet, so I guess the next time I play, I’ll do that. If I still don’t have any leads, I guess I’ll go off in and explore a region I’ve yet to travel to.
I’ve already seen three interesting areas that look open to me: On the other side of the mountain range to the southeast of the Stable, there’s a tropical-looking land with what appear to be palm or coconut trees growing everywhere.
Outside of Hateno village, there’s the beach area, which I don’t know that I can explore too well without flight or a boat. And there’s the swampy looking area with the Lizard people to the North of Kakariko village. I could also go back East of Kakariko and explore the road to the Lanaryo mountain region. I’ve been through that area a bit already, mountain climbing, and it seemed fairly desolate and there wasn’t very much around, but that just feels wrong, given how there seems to be something of interest every 10 feet in the other parts of the world that I’ve been to.
The other option that’s open to me right now is to try to find the four Legendary Beasts. But that sounds like something I’m not ready for just yet. Although, if I try, I will get to explore four new areas on the map that I haven’t been to, and maybe it will trigger some of my lost memories in the process. And probably I’ll find shrines and new forage and creatures to take pictures of.
I also saw a picture in the guide book that came with my copy of the game that shows Link riding on a bear, and I know where I can find a bear, so now I kindof want to see if I have what it takes to tame a bear. I bet I need more stamina for that, though.