I look around Gerudo town for the thirsty boy with my snow shoes, but I can’t find him.
I give up looking for him for the time being, and try to figure out what’s going on with the girl who sits on the top of the wall eating melons all day and all night. All she tells me to do is go away. I notice she drops her melon rinds into a fountain river. The desert town of Gerudo is strangely wasteful when it comes to their public water works. The water flows from a tower at the top of the city through a series of aqueducts that run along the city walls through open channels and a system of waterfalls. It’s very beautiful. The melon girl drops her melon rinds into the city water system and they float down stream like a little boat. I decide to follow the boat to see where they lead to. They end up going down a waterfall into a dead-end where there is nothing. Sometimes during the day, a little girl playing in this part of town tells me that she is planning to start growing a garden here, but she doesn’t know what to plant. Maybe she should try planting melons? I don’t get it.
I go to the Gerudo Secret Club and buy the luminous suit. I find out that your inventory for clothing expands to a new page, so the two empty slots I thought I have is really more than that. I wonder if it will expand again if I fill it the rest of the way. I don’t know what this suit even does, but it sure looks cool. I imagine it must have some special effect at night, beyond just glowing I mean.
I decide I’m ready for more adventure, so I take a trip back out to the western Gerudo Highlands, and do some more exploring. I get back to the area where the last shrine I found was located, and kill more bokoblins, and cook some meals at a cooking pot they have, and then sit by the fire until morning. Then I ride the updraft to the top of the mountain and explore up there. It’s a fairly wide, flat open plain up there, with a lot of snow, and what looks like a frozen river channel cutting through it. I find a number of chests in the frozen ground and open them to find rupees, gems, weapons, the usual stuff.
Then, I hear the familiar music that plays whenever the great dragon Farosh is near. I see him and he’s very near. He’s so close I could probably hit him with a weapon twice as long as a typical spear if I wanted to. The dragon never seems to be hostile toward me, and just minds his own businsess, so I’ve never attacked him. I figured he must have about a million hit points and would kill me easily regardless of what I did. But I’m aware that I’m supposed to get a scale from him somehow, as part of the shrine quest at the Spring of Courage in the jungle zone of Faran. So, figuring it’s worth a shot, I take aim and shoot at Farosh with my bow, and hit him. Something flies off of him, like a shooting star, and lands nearby. Farosh pays me no mind, and continues flying, unbothered. I run over, and find a scale — just what I’ve been needing for many weeks.
Also up here on the mountaintop, there’s a white and black Lynel, who looks like a zebra, patrolling part of the mountain plain. Nearby, there’s a burly looking moblin standing guard near an immense rock statue of a sword, that looks like it belongs to the Eighth Heroine statue nearby. I snap a picture of them, and then kill the moblin, who drops a heavy claymore sword.
I decide that since I have the dragon scale, I should try to complete the shrine quest at the Spring of Courage. But before I go do that, I decide to go to the Fairy pond at Kakariko village and get my clothing augmented as much as possible, and pick up some fairies. I’m in luck — there’s four fairies and I catch them all. It turns out that the Fairy at Kakariko can boost a lot of my clothes, and I have a bunch of the materials needed to do it, so I max out just about everything, with the exception of the two necklaces that I bought at Gerudo town, and the luminous suit, which I upgrade but not fully. I need some stuff that I don’t have or don’t have enough of to upgrade it further.
I transport to the shrine on the south peak of Dueling Peaks mountain, which is just north of the Serpent’s Mouth area where the Spring of Courage is, and head South and downhill. Along the way, I find two or three more korok seeds.
I make it down to the Shrine of Courage, and kill the moblin standing guard here. The first time I cleared out this area, I had to do it from long range, hitting the moblin with many arrows to bring him down. This time I just drop in from above and beat him to death with a DMC, and it’s easy. The Moblin Club knocks him down and I’m on him again before he can recover and get back to his feet, and he doesn’t do a bit of damage to me.
I go to the statue at the Spring of Courage temple, and it tells me the same thing it always has, to offer the Scale of Farosh to the Spring of Courage. I go to my inventory and pull out the scale and hold it, and nothing happens. I try putting it down, and it takes a couple of tries to find the right place to make the offering, but eventually it clicks and the quest is complete; a shrine is revealed behind a secret door at the back of the Spring of Courage temple, and I go in and claim my spirit orb.
Now that I know a thing or two about Farosh, I decide to try going back to Mount Lanayru to see if I can figure out what’s going on with the dragon who is sick on top of the mountain there.
I transport to Hateno village, first, and talk to a man in the village who seems to be a simple farmer. But when I go to the Quests menu on the pause screen, and select the quest for the Spring of Wisdom, it tells me to go to Hateno, and the point indicated on the map is where this dud gardens. So I talk to him, and he tells me about Lanayru, but nothing particularly interesting or useful. I’m pretty sure I talked to him way back when, about a month ago in real time, and couldn’t get much of a clue out of him, other than Lanayru was a place I should go explore.
Well, I guess I’ll go explore then. I transport to the one shrine I’ve found on the mountain, and hike the rest of the way. It’s difficult with snow boots, but I get there eventually. Along the way, I find another korok seed puzzle, but I am unable to solve it because I can’t run fast enough without having my snow boots. Dammit, thirsty creeper dude, gimme my shoes back!
When I get back to the Spring of Wisdom, the Dragon Naydra looks worse than I remember. He is covered with the evil looking purple goo that I’ve seen before, and now recognize from having seen it in various places: covering Hyrule Castle, in the Divine Beast Vah Naboris, and in the great Gerudo Labyrinth and some of the shrines there. Now, I am also noticing that the goo is covered with eyeballs, which, as I’ve learned from my adventures around Hyrule, You Need To Shoot Eyeballs With Arrows.
These eyeballs are particularly big. I nock an arrow, and loose it at the nearest eyeball. This stirs Naydra to action, and he takes flight, circling Lanayru peak. I manage to hit another eyeball, and then he changes course, flying higher and it’s too far to reach with a bow shot effectively. I have to lead and elevate, and it’s too windy and Naydra’s movement too unpredictable to make an accurate shot. I could get lucky, but it’s probably less than a 1% chance I’ll hit with anything. I try, maybe a dozen times, and am down to about 20 arrows or so, when I notice that the winds on Lanayru peak are blowing upward, like the updrafts that I’ve ridden in around Rito and Gerudo Highlands. So I jump up and catch the wind in my glider, and take to the sky, and this gets me close enough to Naydra again that I’m able to make an easy shot from mid-air. I hit two more eyeballs, and then he flies further away, down the mountain away from me. I pursue, but lose the updraft, and am running low on stamina. I use the last bit of it to hit the final eyeball, flying in very close to make sure I get a good shot at it. I hit it, and fortunately the game goes to a cutscene, and I don’t need to make the landing. I’m back at the goddess statue at the Spring of Wisdom, and it instructs me to fire a ceremonial arrow into the body of Naydra. This yields a scale, which I’m then instructed to offer at the spring, just as I did a short time ago at the Spring of Courage. This unlocks another secret door where I find another temple, and get another spirit orb.
Cool. That’s two major, long-standing side quests completed in less than an hour.
I decide to go to the Serenne Stable next to show the photo of the Gerudo Leviathan skull to the scientist there who wants to see it. He thanks me, but I guess the other three scientists want to see theirs first before I’ll get anything for this. Ok, fine.
Pikango is at Serenne Stable and tells me to go southwest to a point north of Hyrule Castle, and I can unlock another memory photo. I try to find it, but don’t know quite where to look yet. I decide I should try instead to unlock the map for this region, which means taking a long hike to the East to get to the tower. I don’t meander to explore much, and try to take as direct a route as I can to the tower.
As I get closer, the terrain becomes increasingly war-torn, and bokoblins and moblins and lizals become increasingly plentiful. I avoid fighting as much as possible, and keep my focus on getting to the tower and activating it.
As I get closer, I see the way will be difficult. There’s a swamp surrounding the tower, which I can’t swim in, and so I have to traverse it by playing “the floor is lava” with a series of enemy fortification towers and piers. I guess they built seige works in this area for the battle 100 years ago, and the remnants are rotting away in this swamp, making for a viable route to get to the tower, albeit a bit of an obstacle course. And this one has a few monsters patrolling.
I fight two or three lizals, two moblins, two bokoblins, and a red wizzorobe, who drops a fire rod, which is the next weapon that I needed for the Hateno village sidequest involving the young boy who is interested in weapons. So I grab it, and sacrifice a Knight’s Claymore from my inventory in order to do so — the Knight’s Claymore has an attack rating of 38, the fire rod has a damage rating of 5. So that’s how dedicated I am to completing my side quests.
I need to find a way to the tower, and after scoping around the swamp, I see that the best route for me appears to be to climb to a geographical high point, and then glide from there to a wooden tower in the water, and climb it, and take a little bridge across to another wooden tower, climb it, and then glide to the Sheikah tower. Something in the swamp below is electrifying the water, I assume a yellow lizal in the water, and when I get closer that turns out to be exactly what it is.
I don’t want to directly fight my way up the tower, so I just hit it with a freeze arrow, and then run away out of its range of vision, hoping to climb the rock that I need to glide from to get to the tower, where I should be high enough to be safe from the lizal.
Just then, it starts raining, so for the next two hours in game time I’m unable to climb the rock to glide and carry this plan out. I spend the time looking around, but visibility isn’t great as it’s raining and dark out. But down below I do see what appears to be a new species of fish in a river that runs past the swampy region around the tower. I don’t get close enough to identify them as it would involve climbing and it’s raining.
Eventually the rain subsides, and I glide to the wooden tower. I knock out a bokoblin who is waiting for me there, then climb and ahead of me I see a strong-looking, well-armed moblin. I hit him with an ice arrow, intending to just run past, but as I do I lose control over the camera, can’t see the ground, and accidentally run off the bridge and fall into the swamp, and “soft-die”, which respawns me, minus a couple of hearts, at the point where I fell from, which happens to be right next to the moblin, who is thawing.
OK fine. So I equip my Guardian Axe++, an attack rating 60 weapon, and do a charge attack on the moblin, which also triggers my Urbosa’s Vengeance attack, and this is enough to one-shot the moblin, as well as a bokoblin who was on the next level above me on the wood tower. I collect their loot drops, and then glide to the map tower, and climb it, and activate it.