Out of ideas for how to fix the broken Sky Tower in this zone, I decide to try to finish some of the active quests in my log and then explore looking for more of the locations I’ve pinned on the map that I’ve been meaning to check out. Some are shrines, some are towers.
I fast travel to the horse stable where I found the woman who wanted help fixing her wagon. I go and find two wagon wheels nearby, and Ultrahand them onto the cart, fixing. She is very happy, but now she needs a horse. So I go and tame one of the wild horses nearby in the field, and bring it to her. This completes an easy sidequest in just a few minutes. She thanks me profusely and gives me a silver rupee worth 100 rupees, which is a pretty good reward for me since I need all I can get to pay for clothes and other stuff I’m sure I’ll need.
Having completed this objective, I fast travel again to shrine nearest to one of the pinned locations on the map. This pin is a Sky Tower in another zone that I have yet to explore. It looks as though I’ll have to glide a long way and cross a wide canyon or river, and then still have a long way to go to get to this tower. And it seems that it’s a long, steep climb up the canyon wall on the other side.
My glide gets me a decent way across the canyon or river — it’s dark and I can’t tell what’s at the bottom. I’m not sure how far I can make it, and I don’t want to lose too much altitude and end up in the bottom of the canyon, and have to climb out or else have a long walk along the canyon floor, so when I see a glow on one of the islands in the middle of the canyon, I decide to check it out. It looks like a campfire, and I’m hoping it will be friendlies.
I’m in luck, and I’ve managed to find a Hylian outpost at a place called Diggdogg Suspension Bridge. I’d heard someone mention this bridge a while ago in my travels, but I don’t recall where or what I had heard. Possibly Kakariko Village. There’s a fallen Zonai ruin here, and people investigating it. I’m told there’s another stone tablet with runes on it, but I don’t locate it to read it. I do talk to a bunch of people, though, and most of them tell me of the hazards of the Gerudo desert, which is across the canyon on the other end of the bridge.
The desert gets frigid at night, and super hot during the day. Without being acclimated, I will take damage. I’ve played this game before, so I know what to expect. I can cook special meals that will give me time to explore while I’m immune to the effects of the sun or the cold. Or I can hold a heat or cold source in my hand, and stay cool that way. Or I can find a cave or a shady spot, or water to cool myself in. Eventually, I’ll find some clothing or armor that will give me permanent protection, and I’ll be fine.
I decide to explore ahead, and come to another small camp at the start of the Gerudo canyon. A pair of Hylian travelers are talking about their 3 companions who were with them, but got separated and are missing now. So it’s up to me to find them. It’s not a top priority, but if I see someone who looks in need of help, I’ll do what I can.
Along the way, I do see a column of smoke from a campfire — the travelers mentioned that at night they would probably keep warm by a fire. So I detour that way and investigate it, and sure enough there’s one of the lost travelers. He is deyhydrated, so I offer him a splash melon, which revives him, he thanks me and returns to his friends. His camp has a mysterious green crystal, which I look at. This opens up a shrine quest. The crystal is sending a thin laser like green light in a direction, which if I can follow it, it will reveal the location of the shrine. A clue is that I need to offer a crystal there.
I decide that rather than try to follow the faint, pencil thin line, I will just carry the crystal with me and use it like a flashlight to guide me to the location. I’m not sure what I need to offer — one of my gemstones? A bubbul crystal? I pick up the huge green crystal and start walking in the direction of its beam.
The sun is coming up, and it gets hot, but the canyon walls are high and cast enough shade that I can keep cool enough there, although this slows me down. But I’m already slowed down by carrying this crystal, so I don’t mind really.
I find a Korok who need help reaching his friend, and it’s not a long distance, so I do the good deed, and then leave the giant green crystal behind as I follow the beam into a solid surface. Thinking this must be the place, I try dropping every gem type and crystal-looking object I can think of in my inventory, but nothing happens.
I decide to give up on that and proceed forward, and then notice that the crystal’s beam actually penetrates through this wall and continues onward. Since it’s tough to carry, I decide to just follow the beam until I know where it really ends. I find the location, a much more obvious spot that looks like a Shrine should be there. Again, I try dropping all the crystal-like object I can think of as offerings, but nothing works.
Maybe I need to carry that green crystal all the way here, maybe that’s the offering? Well, I’ll try that later; right now I’m more interested in exploring ahead a bit further The river here is cool and keeps me from overheating.
A bit further ahead, I discover some construction wood and a fan and what looks like a kind of control yoke or steering wheel, an object I have not seen before. I try assembling a raft and this is indeed what it looked like; I now have a boat that I can steer and move upriver with more quickly. Sweet.
I hop on and go as far up the river as I can, and then stop when I find something interesting. There’s a sand bar with some forage, I pick up a treasure chest and break open a few boxes and get arrows. I seem to be getting a lot of arrows, probably the game is preferring to drop them for me since I’m so low on them. Good.
A bit further upriver, I find a cave entrance at the bottom of the canyon, and make another Discovery. There are a lot of gems and other forage items, including bright seeds, so I’m happy to mine this area for all it’s worth. I run into some Horriblins, and kill them, and proceed deeper into the cave, run into a bubbulfrog, and kill it, collecting another bubbul frog gem. Then I find more Zonai parts that I can assemble, I create a balloon platform and use it to ascend up to the top level of the cave. There’s shaft of light and some sand cascading down from the hole, and I want to check it out. It’s a semi-hidden part of the cave which leads up to the surface. I use Ascend to get up, testing to see if it’s too hot for me, and it is. So I run back to the edge of the canyon and jump down until I’m back in the shade and the cool water, and head back to the location where that crystal indicated the shrine should be.
I have it figured out. The giant green crystal is the key. I’m not supposed to just follow the laser light, I’m supposed to carry the crystal all the way to the shrine site, and then place it there as an “offering”.
This is made much easier when I recognize that there’s some Zonai tech at the site where I found the lost traveler. A wheeled platform and a control yoke. It is broken and embedded in the ground as a result of a sky island falling on it from above, but I pull it out and reassemble it, and mount the crystal on it, and it works amazingly well. It’s a very capable offroad machine and can go up the river and even up the short waterfalls with no problem. And if I do get stuck, or run out of batteries, I can carry it with me while I recharge, using Ultrahand.
So I open the shrine, and it rewards me with a Light of Blessing.
It’s pretty cool that I missed the first clue to solving this puzzle, but immediately ran into a more obvious example of the same mechanic, which helped me to recognize what I could do to make the challenge easier and solve the puzzle.
Next, I rebuild the boat and take it back up river, intending to fully explore the rest of the channel. But as I get to where that cave I had explored earlier, I accidentally break the boat, and this changes my plans. I once again go through the cave, and this time I use Ascend to reach the top of the canyon wall that the cave is embedded within.
I’m actually pretty close to the Skyview Tower, and decide to go for it. It’s nighttime, and my cold weather pants are keeping me safe, so I have no problem getting there. The last bit of it is fun; there’s a bunch of scaffoldings with elevators on them, and they make it so that I don’t have to climb up the walls of the hill that I’m currently standing at the base of, to reach the tower.
At the final elevator to the tower, I find a Hylian man who is stuck because the elevator has broken and cannot operate. He tells me the Skyview tower is out of order, but he is here to fix it, if only he can get up to the top, which he can’t do due to the elevator being broken.
It’s obvious that I just need to Ultrahand glue a heavy weight to the opposite side of the elevator and he’ll get up to the top in no time. So I go find a weight suitable for this purpose, and attach it, and up he goes.
By now the sun is up and it’s too hot to go up to talk to him to finish this and activate the tower, so I need to wait for a bit. A cloud mercifully passes overhead, reducing my wait time. I rush out and talk to the repair man, and he thanks me and then fixes the tower mechanism. I activate the tower and go up to scan the map data.
While I’m up there, I see a nearby sky island that I want to head toward, but I fumble with the controller and fail to hit the X button to glide until I’ve descended too far to reach it. I just barely make it to the bottom most projection, and there’s nowhere I can climb to with my remaining stamina, and I also can’t stand anywhere to attempt to use Ascend, so I’m screwed.
I fast travel back to the tower, and go up again to retry what I just screwed up.
This time, though I end up seeing an even nearer sky island, and it looks interesting, so I go to it instead. When I get closer, it looks similar to one I’ve been on before, and I’m not sure if it is the same one or not.
I conclude that it must not be the same one that I had been on once before, when I notice a large ramp with rails running up it, and a Zonai wing with some fan bladed attached to it. There’s another Zonai wing with two more fans attached to it. And laying on the round I find two rockets. I decide to see what this thing does. Trying to maximize my boost, I try gluing the two wings together, in tandem, so I will have double the lift and double the fans, and then I attach the rockets as well. I put my contraption on the ramp and stand on it, then activate, and I zoom off, upward into the sky. Which is great for a few seconds, but my Zonai battery pack capacity is still unimproved since I received it, and I only get a few seconds of flight time. As the wing loses airspeed it begins to stall, and then falls downwards. It doesn’t seem to have much capability to glide, at least not as I’ve built it.
I take a running leap off the nose and glide as far as I can. I’m still way, way up, and in no hope of reaching anything I can land on before I run out of stamina. So I wonder if I would have been better off just using a single wing, for less mass, and put all the engines on it? Or do I just need a bigger battery? Or use something to recharge my battery in flight? Hmm.
As I’m gliding, I see a shooting star fall from the sky. I’m actually higher than it as it falls through the atmosphere toward the ground, and I see it land very clearly, and it makes a large dust cloud when it hits. I can see the spot clearly, and to make sure I don’t lose it, I activate my telescope and pin the location. This actually works and somehow I don’t screw up and fall to my death.
I wonder if I can reach it? I check the map to see where the pin is, and it’s what seems like an impossible distance away, deep into the next uncharted zone, and pretty much right next to another pin I had already placed on the map — a location I marked where I saw a large geoglyph while I was up in the sky, that I wanted to check out at some point. It looks like now is the time.
I glide as far as I can, but I reach the end of my stamina meter and begin to fall well before I’ve reached a safe altitude to land on anything. I have a very slight chance of surviving if I hit X to re-deploy the glider one last time just before I hit the ground, otherwise I’m splat.
I manage to survive landing, although I deploy the last-ditch chute a bit early and end up falling enough to do me a lot of damage. I’m left with a fraction of a heart, and to make matters worse I’m in a frigid area, where even my snow pants aren’t protection enough to keep me from taking damage. I pause and devour a meal that gives me cold resistance, and start running toward the pinned location where the star fell. I’m also keeping its beacon in sight at all times, and maximizing my run by using up nearly all of my stamina meter and releasing it just before it runs out, so that it will recharge at its normal rate; if I screw that up, and use all of the stamina, I move very slowly while the stamina meter also recharges very slowly, and I can’t afford to waste any time.
I run and run and run and run and run, gliding whenever possible, and miraculously cover the distance. I am nearly to the crash site, which is on the side of a mountain covered by a geoglyph. I am standing near the top of it and I think I can just jump out and glide over, and then land next to it.
Just as I get close, though, it seems to slide down the side of the hill, and as it does so my heart sinks as I try to match its rate of descent and catch up to it, but cannot, and I see it plummet into the water below and disappear forever.
Well F that. I restore from the most recent autosave and try again. It takes two more tries, but I finally succeed, by going further around, taking a slightly longer route that puts me at the base of the geoglyph, downhill and in the path of the star fragment, which starts sliding down the hill — it seems it must be programmed to do so just as I get close enough, no matter how quickly I get to it. But this time I’ve managed to outsmart the game, it’s falling toward me, not away, and it comes close enough that I’m able to grab it. Success!
I’m elated that I managed to catch the fragment, and it seems like that whole sequence may not have been a random occurrence, like it was meant to happen just the way it did. I wonder about that, but there’s really no way to know for sure.
I walk back to try to find the exact location where the star fragment landed, and I think I find it, marked by a stone that, when I lift it, turns out to be the hiding place of a korok. So is that another coincidence?
This geoglyph is HUGE and the mountainside it is painted on is steep and massive. It’s very hard to traverse and it’s hard to orient myself to see where the trigger spot is for the cutscene that I need to watch in order to complete another part of Impa’s quest.
I’m down near the bottom but I have no idea where to look for the story activation spot, and I have only a vague idea of what the thing looked like, from memory, from up above when I first saw it, days ago. So it’s pretty hopeless.
Making matters even worse, it begins to rain. That ruins any hope of me doing anything but sliding downhill until the weather changes. Dang it.