Zelda: BOTW Diary (73)

More foraging.  I return to Death Mountain looking for smotherwing butterflies, and still come up empty handed. But I pick up a new sidequest, and finish another one, and find an old memory spot.

First I return to the Korok woods to farm more stealthfin trout, but I only find two.  Next, I transport to Ridgeland Tower.  I recall the large mushroom forest that I barely explored, and want to see if there’s anything of interest there.  I glide down from the tower the mushroom forest, and it’s raining and thundering intensely, pretty much non-stop, and I have no non-metal weapons at the moment, so this is not too great.  I land on the top of the nearest tall mushroom and walk forward, and a voice tells me that I’ve been challenged to put some balls where they belong and it will reveal another shrine for me.  OK swell.  I live for this kind of thing. 

It’s night, dark AF, raining and thundering on top of it.  Ahead of me there’s a raised circle of land, built up like the foundation of a building, and there are four stone pillars.  It’s too rainy to climb them effectively, but if I wear the complete climbing outfit and use the jump-climb technique, I can just barely get to the top of one using all my stamina.  I see a purple ball and put it in the socket in front of the purple statue.  Nearby, but off the raised circle of land, I see two more balls, red and orange.  I can’t figure out how to get the balls up on to the land so I can  put them in their sockets.  It’s rainy, they’re exceedingly heavy, and I don’t have a lot of options.  It seems like maybe I’m meant to knock them using time-stasis, like golf balls, but I screw it up and they’re down in the swampy ground now.  I give up and leave, hoping they’ll reset when I return.  

Up in the sky, I see a shooting start falling, but it lands way far off, and I am too low to be able to see its landing spot in order to mark it on my sheikah scope, and lose the opportunity to pick up another star fragment.

I decide to return to Death Mountain to farm more lizards and butterflies.  I talk to a Goron in Goron City who is looking for his brother, and tells me to find him in a tunnel, where the brother had gone looking for a Hero’s Secret. Which, I assume is a shrine. I go there, and find the brother, passed out and weak with exhaustion.  His big brother shows up and tells me to fetch some food from down by the cliff, and bring it back and he’ll cook it up for him.  I go, and the way is paved with moblins.  I fight the moblins, and they are well armed and use fire arrows, but of course I’m wearing my fire proof armor suit and am well-armed as well.  I fight my way down to the bottom where the food is, and then have to carry it up the way I came, where somehow more moblins have returned, and also now there’s rocks rolling down the hill.  It’s a bit unpleasant, but I manage OK, and revive the brother.  He is so rejuvenated that he digs away the rock he had been working at before he passed out, and reveals the Hero’s Secret, a shrine.

The shrine is very simple.  It’s a long ramp that I have to walk up, while large metal balls roll down at me.  They’re mostly easy to avoid, and you can use magnetism and time-stop on them as well.  I do get hit a few times, and this sucks because it knocks me way back down.  It’s a steep incline, about a 30-40 degree slope, I’d guess, but I make it to the top, there’s a treasure chest on a high shelf that I can easily glide to from the top of the ramp, it just has rupees in it, and I claim my spirit orb.

I talk to a Gerudo woman who’s visiting Goron City, and she is trying to mine gems, and wants to buy amber from me, so I sell her some amber that I happen to have plenty of on me, and this completes another sidequest.  I also run into Pikango the painter, who tells me where I can find another memory photo location.    

I find a few more korok seeds in the area as I explore around looking for the photo spot.  It takes me a long time to find it, but I eventually do so by triangulating — lining up the points in the middleground with the background to work out where the photo must have been taken.  It’s difficult because of the terrain, but eventually I get closer and closer, and after exploring for about two solid game-days, I find it.  In this memory, Link is being tended to by the Princess, after fighting a huge number of strong-looking enemies.  Bodies of moblins, bokoblins, and lynels are strewn everywhere.  Zelda expresses her concern for Link’s safety and advises him to be more careful, and then expresses her belief that the increase in the number and strength of monsters likely means a return for Calamity Ganon.

Ya think?

I’m still looking for materials to improve my gear to 100%, and I’m also looking for shrines.  I need 4 heart containers to complete my second row of hearts on my life meter.  I know about the shrine quest in the mushroom forest, so I return there, transporting to the nearby tower and then gliding in as I did last time.  This time, I don’t mess up my golf swings and I manage to get the balls on the green.  The other balls that I had successfully placed in their basins are still where I left them, which is nice.  I place the final two in their sockets, and the shrine is revealed.

This shrine is called Buried Secrets or something to that effect, and it involves bombing rocks to reveal a steel box which I need to use to trigger a floor switch to open the shrine master’s chamber.  It’s a very simple solution, not tricky in any way. 

There are two chests in the shrine, one hidden behind a bombable rock underneath the starting platform, which contains the rubber armor to complete my set.  I’d been wondering where I would find it, and of course it’s in the shrine that’s in the middle of a thunderstorm.  The other chest is on top of a tall square pillar, too high to climb, and the blocks are no help at all, as they are not climbable and I can’t push them together to make stairs.  I solve this one by using the magnetic block to knock the chest off the pillar and onto the floor.  My reward is a silver Rupee.

Exiting the shrine, the thunderstorm has dissipated outside, and the skies are fair.  

Thinking about where else I can go, I decide to try to finish the Spring of Power shrine quest, and for that I will need Dinraal’s scale.  The red dragon appears regularly flying over the deep canyon by Tabantha snowfield, so I transport there.  I see him, but not close enough to get a shot at scoring a scale.  While running, my shrine sensor starts going off, and I follow the signal, across the canyon to where the weather is warm and rainy.  I have to fight monsters along the way, and eventually I zero in on the shrine, and it’s halfway up a cliff behind a bombable rock.  To get to it, I have to climb to the top of the cliff and then fire a bomb arrow down, and glide into the cave that it opens up.  It’s too rainy to climb up from the bottom, so I walk a long way and go up a walkable grade around to the left, and then make my way back until I’m up above the bombable rock.  At first I try dropping remote bombs down to it, but I can’t quite reach with a throw, and my timing isn’t good, and it’s taking too much time, so I bite the bullet and fire a bomb arrow down and it does the job in one shot.

I swoop in and the shrine has no challenge, it’s just a blessing shrine, finding it is its own reward.  I get another 100 rupee chest, and a Spirit Orb, and then I’m on my way again.

I still want to find Dinraal the fire dragon, so I can get some pieces of him to improve my armor, or whatever, I forget what exactly needs it, but it’ll be good if I can find it.  I go back to the canyon, and head north-east until I get to the start of it, near the location of the Forgotten Temple.  I’m sure Dinraal will appear here if I wait long enough, but I’m not sure what time.  So I wait and wait, and it rains and rains, and Dinraal never shows up. I get tired of waiting for him, and give up and try to find the other dragon, Naydra.  I’ve never gotten a scale or anything from Naydra, either, and I’m sure those would come in handy.  I transport out to the Spring of Wisdom and climb up to the top of Mount Lanayru to see if he’s there, as he often is, but this time he’s not, and after waiting around for the better part of the day all I’ve managed to do is waste some time.

Updated: 2020-Jun-27 — 12:16 am

Leave a Reply