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It’s raining again in Farun, and it’s hard to see far due to the rain and the dense jungle, and it’s impossible to climb, and there’s not much around to see or do at the Dondon pen. I’m really curious about that Satori experience I just had, which led me here, and I want to go back and see if I can find the cherry blossom tree, which I should have marked on the map but understandably in my excitement I had forgotten to do.

I quick-travel back to the shrine near the horse stables that I had embarked from, hoping I’ll be able to retrace my steps. It turns out to be surprisingly simple — right from the shrine, I am able to see the tall pillars that I remembered climbing which started me out on the last adventure. I glide down to the nearest one and climb it, and find the korok that I found the last time still dangling from his pinwheel. I look down and the cherry blossom tree is very nearby, barely more than a stone’s throw away from the shrine and the stables. Wow. In my mind it had seemed like a much longer walk to get here the first time.

I mark the spot on the map, save, and then offer the statue in front of the tree another apple. The mystical blue lights appear again, marking the overworld like my pins on the map.

I have it in mind to try to mark as many of these points as I possibly can before the effect wears off. It seems most efficient to do so. I think, I’ll just look around with the Purah Scope, place pins directly onto the Satori lights, then switch to the Map view so I can replace the Pins with Stickers, so that I can keep re-using the Pins and mark many more than just six locations.

It’s a really good idea, but it doesn’t work out so well in practice. Most of the Satori spots are low lying, many of them cave entrances well concealed down at the bottom of hills, many of which are on the far side of the hill from where I stand. So it’s all but impossible to mark these locations with map pins, because in order to pin a location, you have to be able to place the pin on a physical, solid object, and the Satori light is not a physical object. I could put a pin close to the light, or shoot right through it and end up plotting a course that is way, way off the mark from the site that I was really trying to get to.

So this doesn’t work out so well. But the Satori lights do last a while, it seems about a full day, and it’s a lot of time if you want to move quickly, and I’m pretty capable of doing that.

I try to visit as many of the spots that have lit up as possible while I can. I find a few more Excavation Sites, and these generally have a physics puzzle that I have to solve in order to open a gate which gives access deeper into the cave, usually I find a treasure chest with some minor prize in it, and often a bubbul frog as well. I try to get as many bubbul frog gems as I can, still not know what they may be used for, and for all I know they’re just “achievement points” for how much of the game you’ve explored, and not useful in-game for anything. But I’d really like to know, because I’m putting a fair bit of time into trying to get them, and it’d be nice if it was worthwhile, beyond the enjoyment of just doing it for its own sake.

I get a bit turned around and end up, I think, visiting the same two excavation points and going back and forth between them, wasting time. But then I see one of the Satori spots is in the water of Lake Hylia, a raging whirlpool. I might have guessed that it was something interesting, but probably wouldn’t have chanced it before, fearing the danger and expecting that at some point a safe method of going into it would present itself. But now I’m feeling like this Satori light is a signpost telling me that it is safe to go to it.

I have to hike a bit to get close, and I try to glide as much of the way as possible. As I get close, it seems to me that I’ll need to glide from the top of the towers of Lake Hylia Bridge, and that’s a bit risky because Gleeok is guarding the bridge, and I don’t know what its range is, or what its powers are, exactly.

It turns out that Gleeok doesn’t see too well, or doesn’t care about people unless they get really close. And it’s hard to see, but maybe I’m somehow coming up from the back side of the direction Gleeok is facing, which probably doesn’t hurt my chances of avoiding its 3-headed gaze.

I come up to the bridge tower nearest the whirlpool, and climb it. At the top, I discover a korok puzzle, an easy one that involves running to the opposite tower before a countdown times out. I manage the feat and collect my seed. Then it’s time to save and glide down as close to the whirlpool as I can get.

It turns out I can get right up to it, and I glide over and drop down into it. I get sucked down, and fall into a cave. A cave which somehow is not full of water, but has water constantly pouring down it from the lake above. It’s a rather vast space, and in it I find some forage materials, a bubbul frog, and a shrine quest. It’s another gem quest. This time I’m at the shrine, and it’s telling me to find the gem at the other end of a green laser beam that’s projecting directly upward, vertically through the ceiling of the cave.

I suspect that this means I can just Ascend up through the cave ceiling, and somehow maybe I’ll end up in another space between this cave and the bottom of the lake. Or maybe I’ll even be in the lake on the floor, or who knows. But ceiling is too high for me to use Ascend, so that’s not it.

I puzzle over this for a bit, and surmise that this may mean that the gem on the other end of the laser beam may be up in the Sky Level. I look at the map to see if there are any Sky Islands directly above the lake, and it’s hard for me to tell because I don’t yet have this region’s map data. I do have a bit of the adjacent region though, because that’s the Sky Island where you start out the game. The Cave of Awakening and The Temple of Time are both right nearby, and are convenient fast-travel points.

I try teleporting up there to see if I can see a Sky Island with a laser beam flashing down out of it into the lake. But at the range I’m at, seeing a pencil thin beam of light is probably not possible. Still, I go to the edge of the Sky Island, making a beeline toward Lake Hylia’s whirlpool below, and using the scope, I can see some sky islands, far below the level I’m on, and a good ways out.

I’m not sure if I can make it by gliding, but I try. I have to try a few times, and it’s at the extreme end of my range, but I do have enough stamina upgrades to fly directly to it, and then Dive down, flare my paraglider at the last second, and make a safe landing.

Once I land, I find the sky island is pretty tiny, and populated only by birds and golden colored trees, with a stone building that looks like a temple in the center. I’m in the back of it, and when I walk around to the front, I find stairs leading up to an entrance room where I find the green glowing gem associated with the shrine in Lake Hylia Cave. Sweet! I figure it out.

I wonder about how I’m supposed to get the gem from here down to the shrine location thousands of feet below and beneath the lake floor. It seems like it would be all but impossible to line up a drop and throw the gem off the edge. Then I notice a square hole in the floor, leading to open air. I surmise this is the way, and I carry the gem to the hole, and then jump down.

As soon as I’m falling, I can’t hold onto the gem anymore, and it seems to fall slower than me, at first. But it catches up, and then accelerates past me, and I begin to worry that I’ll lose it, or cause it to despawn. I try the R button to dive in order to fall faster, and I’m not sure if it mattered or not, but I do end up splashing down in the Lake, and getting sucked down into the whirlpool immediately, and when I emerge on the other end of the waterfall in the cave, I find that the gem is there right next to me. All I have to do is pick it up and walk it over to the shrine’s spot, and complete the quest.

It was really satisfying to figure this out, follow the clues, and solve this puzzle. I like that it employed verticality that included all three world levels, and made them feel entirely connected, rather than three separate spaces.

I receive a Mighty Zonai Sword and a Light of Blessing from Rauru, and am feeling more enlightened than I did before I started this quest.

It’s hard to remember exactly what I did in this session, because mostly I screwed around aimlessly and fucked off and died a bunch of times.

I wasn’t trying to do anything in particular, but I found a few korok seeds, saw another shooting star fall to earth and collected the meteorite from it, wandered into a Stalnox encounter, which I ran away from, found another korok looking for his friend, the first one that I wasn’t able to find a solution for. This one was near a stable, the one near the ruins of Hyrule Colosseum, and his friend was way the hell up on top of a cliff that I couldn’t find a way to walk to. I tried building a big long ramp to get up there, and still couldn’t manage it, so I gave up for a bit, and tried climbing the cliff myself, but even with two Stamina boosts I couldn’t get up there, and so I decided to try something else.

I noticed a piece of Hyrule’s Sky Land falling to earth nearby, and this was the first time it occurred to me that I could probably use Recall on it, to get it to fall upward, and use that to ride it up as high as I could get while time was moving backward. I tried it, and sure enough it worked. This got me WAY high in the sky, but not high enough to reach any sky islands, so instead I used the glider to land on top of the tall cliff that I couldn’t climb. I had pinned a location there, and wanted to check it out.

It turned out to be a Goron, who had built a test of strength. Kind of like the Goron Golf game that you can discover in BOTW, only this one was a bell ringing thing. It cost 30 rupees to try. I tried shooting the bell with an arrow, which “worked” but didn’t ring loud enough to earn me any reward. I then understood that the point of the test was to build a contraption out of Ultrahandable parts laying about, and come up with a way to ring the bell. There were rockets, uprighters, some bombs, a spring platform, rocks, tree trunks, platforms.. it seemed like a lot of different approaches were possible here. But which one would create the biggest ring?

I tried and tried for like an hour at least to put shit together in such a way that it would make a big loud ring, but it was frustrating, mainly because of balance. Whatever you get for scoring high enough to win, it’s not worth it. So I gave up on it and went back to trying to find a way to bring the korok down below up to his buddy. I looked at the map and it appeared that maybe it would be possible to carry the korok all the way around the base of this mesa, or whatever you want to call it, and carry him up the back of it. But it would take a long time at the speed at which you can walk while carrying a korok with Ultrahand. It seems like there should be a better solution, involving your powers, that is clever and quick, but I can’t figure it out. I try scouting out the long approach, and discover there are Aerocudas and Bokoblins along the way, so I try fighting them to clear them out, and keep dying because I can’t get the timing and the controls to do the perfect dodge or parry, and trigger a flurry rush.

So eventually I try just running past them, and that kind of works, but it gets the entire valley chasing my ass, and I have to run a really long way to get monsters to give up on trying to kill you in this game.

I tried again and found that it’s fun to shoot an enemy from far away with a muddle shroom arrow, confusing him and turning him enraged so that he tries to kill the other enemies nearby. Either that reduces their strength to where you can clean up afterward, or you can just sneak by while they’re distracted with fighting each other, which is also pretty good.

I also discovered that if you sneak, and stick close to the edge of the cliffs, in the shadows and in the tall grass, you stand a good chance of getting past them without being spotted. It’s cool that there’s so many ways to approach the game and they’re all viable and all valid and fun in their own way.

Around the backside of the mesa, I do find a way to go up, but it’s still a bit steep in places and requires climbing. Probably I could manage to carry the korok up this, put him down on a flat spot, climb where I need to, pick him back up again, but man would that be fucking tedious, and I don’t think it’ll be worth the two korok seeds.

I do find another korok seed, a new type of puzzle where you see what looks like a giant dandelion. I think I’ve seen this dandelion before, but didn’t know what it was or what to do with it. You can hit it, and it causes the dandelion seed to launch into the air, and then gently parachute down. I think I’m supposed to hit it a second time, maybe with an arrow, because that seems really challenging and fun, but that isn’t it. I try a bunch of times, and waste what few arrows I have, but it’s OK because I can find them and pick them up again, so all I’m actually doing is wearing out a bow. Well, eventually while I’m trying to do this, night falls, I see a shooting star fall (the one I mentioned at the start of this post), and I go run across Hyrule to get it. I get to where it lands, and while I’m at the landing site of the meteor, after I pick it up, I discover another one of these mysterious dandelions, only this one is on a bit easier ground to climb off of, and I discover that rather than try to hit it again, you’re supposed to try to “catch” it by using the A button (“Look” command). And it’s just a korok seed… well OK fine.

But now that I know that, I can go back and get the other one, so I do that.

After that, I don’t really know what I want to do, but I feel like I should return to Lookout Landing, and trade in some Blessings for more Stamina, and visit the girl I met in one of the wells, and tell her about some of the others that I’ve discovered.

After that, I don’t recall exactly where I go next, if I fast traveled somewhere, or just ran around, or what I did, but I end up at Ancient Tree, the giant tree stump in the middle of a lake in Central Hyrule, the one which in BOTW came with a Bokoblin bridge leading to a small camp of Bokoblins. This time, it’s abandoned, and more hollow — down the center of the tree, I make a “Discovery!” of a cave underneath the hollow tree trunk. It’s huge, twisted, and there’s tree roots everywhere, making it easy to get turned around, get lost, or miss a hidden corner. But it is full of forage. Due to the difficulty of climbing around and the need to swim a lot, it’s very slow to obtain the forage that’s there, but I do pick up a lot of brightbulbs and bomb fruits, and I even find a bubbulfrog, which I kill and take its glowing thing that it drops. I notice when it gets hit by my arrow that it seems to turn into one of those blue glowing spiritual rabbits, which hops quickly away and disappears. So these bubbulfrogs are tied to the forest spirits or something. Their glowing items that they drop are in the “special items” inventory page, and I have no idea what they might be for.

I fast travel back to… oh hell I forget where, I think the shrine near the horse table to the South that is closest to the Lake of the Horse God, maybe? and just sort of start wandering around. I find that fast travel really interrupts the continuity of my memory when I think about where I’ve been and what I’ve done in the game. It’s a super useful ability to have when I need it, and if I have some deliberate purpose to fast-travel to some location for story reasons (say, I just completed a mission and want to travel to the person who sent me on it, and fast-travel is the quickest, most direct way, I’ll remember that) but if I fast-travel back to a location that is closest to an area I haven’t explored fully, and I want to go back there, I have a hard time remembering exactly how it was I got there.

Anyhow, let’s say I’m around that area. I’m exploring, finding koroks, running away from monsters that I don’t want to fight right now because it’s pointless if it isn’t necessary to do it to complete a mission. And I’m just sort of heading in the direction of a shrine that I pinned on the map a long time ago, a long distance away, in the region of Faron, and I’m gradually working my way in that direction.

It’s slow going because I don’t have a lot of gliding opportunities, I’m kind of at a low lying area on the map and working my way back up in altitude as I make my way east and to the south.

At some point in all this, I don’t know exactly where, I find a big stone pillar that is begging to be climbed. I do, I find a korok at the top. I look to see how far away the shrine I’m heading to is, it’s still very far from here. I look down, I see an interesting square shaped stone formation, looking like it’s the foundation to an old building, and it looks like there’s something in the center of it that I should investigate. So I can choose, do I take off from the top of this pole with the glider and go as far toward the shrine as I can get? Or do I go back down to the ground and check this thing on the ground that I spotted?

I decide to check out the nearby thing on the ground, mainly on the theory that I know the point on the map where the shrine is pinned will still be easy to find, but this will not necessarily be so easy to find again. I drop down and there’s a bombable rock in the center of the stone foundation. It’s night and monsters spawn right when I’m getting into this, so I have to fight off some skeletons, and then I blow my self up a few times trying to get a bomb into this hole, which isn’t easy when you can only throw because you’re out of arrows and the angle is such that it’s easiest if you’re within range of the bomb blast. But eventually I open the chest and… it’s just an old halberd that isn’t particularly good.

Nearby there’s a wizzorobe dancing about, but it hasn’t noticed me, so I’ve bene lucky. I look around some more, and spot a grove of what looks like cherry trees in full blossom, looking very Japanese. They stand out with their pink flower petals blooming, and I obviously need to go check that out. As I get closer, I see a gerudo woman sitting by the trees. I talk to her, she tells me she has come to this place hoping to meet her true love, someone who she hasn’t met. She hopes I am he, but quickly determines that I am not, based on the look on my face. Then she tells me of Satori, a magical animal, and something to the effect that Satori likes offerings of fruit. She wishes she had some fruit. Then I notice a fruit basket at the base of the tree in the center, and it’s obvious to me that I need to put a fruit into this basket.

I try it, and the Lord of the Mountain from BOTW appears, then runs off. All around me, bright blue pillars of spiritual light shoot out from the ground! At a distance, it looks like they’re creating a straight line, and I think I’m meant to follow this line. I have no idea how long these lights will be active, so I hurry and ignore absolutely everything else as I sprint at full speed straight as I can toward the closest light in front of me. This takes me across a river and into Farun, and as I get close to the light it seems to disappear, but when I get to the ground where the light seemed to be emanating from, I notice a well-hidden cave!

Was this what I was meant to find? It seems so. This cave is covered with overgrown vines, so I burn them away with a fire seed, and enter. Inside, there’s a river with a fast moving current. There’s little in the way of forage, but there are a few horriblins, walking about on the ceiling. It’s good to hit a horribilin with an arrow, because that causes them to drop from the ceiling, and then you can fight them with melee weapons more easily. But I am down to my last 3 arrows and there’s more than three horribilins in this cave. Fortunately, I discover that horribilins can’t swim, and when they fall into the water they struggle for a bit and then die, so one arrow is all it takes. And when I run out of arrows, I can throw an object at them, like a bomb or a fire seed, and it’ll knock them down the same way. In this way, I proceed through the cave. At one point there’s a Like LIke, and I am not equipped to deal with it, so I stay out of its way and proceed past it. Eventually I go through a couple of waterfalls, leading to a tall waterfall, and as I go over I spot a bubbul frog, but the only way I could hit it would be arrows, and I have none, so I can’t. At the bottom of the falls, there’s a small grotto, within a cave chamber there’s a treasure chest containing a Rubber Helmet!

Armor is one of the best things to find in these games, because unlike weapons armor is permanent, so this is a major find, for once.

Suddenly I’m really enjoying the game. I seem to be at the end of this cave, and there doesn’t seem to be a way out, so I use Ascend.

When I pop up out of the ground, I am surprised to find that those Satori lights are still active, and there’s way more than I had thought there were! They seem to be all over the place. I quickly run to the next one, and discover ANOTHER cave! This one is a zonai excavation. There’s a gate with a crank wheel that opens when I turn the crank, but immediately shuts if I stop turning it. I use Recall to get the crank to turn without me touching it, and this allows me to get through the gate. There’s another treasure chest, but this one just has a Big Zonai charge. I Ascend to exit, and make it to one or two more Satori lights, before they finally fade. I guess they are time based, but whether it’s a full day or just some set amount of time that they stay lit, I don’t know. I need to go back and mark the Cherry grove on the map so I can go back to it again and offer another fruit. There must have been dozens if not hundreds of spots that lit up, and it’ll be much easier to find them if I can use those lights.

Right now, I’m deep into Faron territory, and the Shrine I wanted to check out is still a bit of a distance from me, but I’m closer to it now than I have ever been, so rather than turn back at this point, I proceed forward. I’m thinking if I can reach it, I will be able to use it as another fast-travel point to get here quickly again in the future.

I don’t know how many rivers and other bodies of water I either glided over or swam across, nor how many rocks, hills, and mountains I climbed over. But eventually, I find a falling piece of sky island, which drops conveniently near me, and I stand on it and activate Recall, and ride it all the way back up into the sky, all the way until the Recall power is spent, and the rock begins to fall again.

I jump off and start gliding, activate my Purah Pad scope to see if I can spot the pin, and it’s really not too far away, I think I should be able to reach it easily by gliding. I do so, and then dive down several hundred feet to land right at the Shrine. I hear familiar theme music, and see the familiar smoke rising from a nearby stable. So this is a double find, then. Every stable seems to have a shrine nearby it, so that you can quickly fast-travel to any stable in Hyrule and take your horse out if you want to explore on horseback.

I enter the Shrine, and this one is a series of bridge challenges. The bridges are links that sag like a suspension bridge without cables. The first one I can cross easily, the second I need to hook up using Ultrahand. The third and fourth are more challenging. The third one has too much slack in the middle and so hooking it up, the bridge is still laying on the ground, and the way forward is to jump to this platform in the middle of the bridge span, but with the bridge laying limply on the ground, it’s not helpful.

It takes me a few minutes but I quickly figure out that I can hold the bridge up like it needs to be using Ultrahand, and then drop it, and use Recall to get it to lift back up and hold itself in place long enough for me to pass the obstacle.

The rest of the shrine is just variations on that theme. If there was a treasure chest in this shrine, I didn’t spot it. I get the Light of Blessing, and have enough of those to trade in for another Stamina or Heart Container.

But first I’m going to visit the stable nearby and see what’s going on there.

The Stable man mentions that there is a well behind the Stable (this seems to be a thing with Stables) which is normally full of water when it is raining, which is all the time, but when the rains stop the water level drops and you can go inside. Looking at the weather upcoming on the HUD, it’s going to stop in another 2 hours, which is like 5 minutes in real time, so I run right over and check it out. Sure enough the water level does drop, and I explore the cave under the well. There’s not a lot to it, though, unless I missed something hidden. It’s small, and not a lot of forage to be had. Still, it’s one more out of the 51 remaining to be discovered somewhere in the world…

There’s a man in a hut looking out across a ravine where there’s a pen with some strange animals and a girl tending to them. I find out that they are called Dondons and I take a picture of them. Some people at another stable were talking about these creatures, and were interested in seeing one. Apparently Princess Zelda found them, there are only 5 known specimens, and they eat luminous stone and (it’s hinted) poop out gemstones of other types. I try offering a luminous stone to the Dondons, but they don’t do anything.

I also help out Addison get another sign posted while I’m here, and there’s a Korok who needs to be taken to his friend just down the road. Both are very easy tasks, and I do them. I’m not really sure what else I should do at Faron Stables or in this region, but they tell me that there’s pirates attacking Lurelin Village nearby. So I should probably help there soon. But combat is my least favorite part of the game still.

A few other things while I’m thinking about it:

• There’s a musical act called the Stable Trotters. The kid with the flute who I met at one of the other stables was a member, and after I helped him he said he wanted to go back to rejoin them. I think, hope that this means that he will play the flute and the fairy who lives near one of the Stables I found will hear him, or maybe he’ll give me the flute and I’ll go play it for the Fairy, and then it will come out, and then I can get my clothing up-armored, and then I can start to enjoy combat a little bit more. With no armor, I get one-shotted by pretty much everything in the game, and I suck at dodging and activating flurry rushes.
• Most of the Stables have posters on the wall depicting a meal recipe. I have yet to try making any of them, but I will be doing that eventually. I try to take pictures of the posters so I can remember them.
• I haven’t been to Rito Village yet, because I’m still trying to find some more cold weather gear, but that seems to be the place everyone wants me to go. The newspaper is headquartered there, and I’ve heard enough to know that it’s an important side quest. Word is the weather in Rito is so cold that the people are starving. I might try cooking some cold resistance meals and just go there if I don’t find any more warm clothing soon.
• I have a similar problem with making progress in Gerudo, but I know how to avoid the desert heat a bit better, since I can travel by night and also stay in the shade. So I might head that way soon, maybe even next.
• I had a really cool Korok score. On the tall column I climbed, there was a Korok pinwheel, which is an archery contest. I only had a single arrow in my inventory, and there were three balloons that I had to take out. They were moving about in a pattern, and would get close together at one point in the pattern. I watched it a while, and loaded up a bomb arrow and took my shot, and fortunately the bomb explosion took out the other two balloons when I hit the one I was aiming at, which was really cool.
• I am getting annoyed with always being low on arrows, but at the same time I kindof like it that the game seems to give you lots of reasons to use arrows when you do have them, so you tend not to be able to keep well stocked on them. I use them as quickly as I come by them, and I can’t seem to find more than 7-8 at a time. I find them all over in crates and such, but 1-2 at a time, or a bunch of 5 if I’m lucky. I can also get them as loot drops from fights, but I’ve been avoiding fighting, and I can farm them by dodging archer enemies when they are shooting at me, but this seems to stop producing new arrows after about 3-4, so it’s both slow and not going to build up a stockpile very quickly. Arrows are much more useful in the game now because they can be used to activate switches and Zonai tech, and with Fuse power you can combine an arrow with just about anything, which invites experimentation and the wastage of shit tons of arrows. This constant arrow shortage probably actually makes the game more “strategic” than it would be if I had 60+ arrows at all times, but between not having unlimited bombs like I did in BOTW and having arrows in short supply, it makes it a lot harder to handle myself in fights. It does make the game more challenging, which I like. But I think I’m going to have to trade in a bunch of forage to get rupees and turn apples and junk I don’t really need much of into arrows and armor, because otherwise coming by rupees is pretty rare, too.

I just finished the shrine from last entry, but didn’t collect the chest. I go back in to do that, and it’s not that hard. The cart rolls back from the landing where you go to collect the Light of Blessing, and slowly enough that it’s no problem to grab the chest with Ultrahand and pull it near, drop it to the floor, and open it.

It contains an elixir of speed, which is ok.

I exit the shrine and return back to the stables and talk to everyone again. This time I take notes.

The lady who talks about sightseeing recommends four destinations nearby:

• West to Menoat River, where I can expect to run into pirates.
• Lakeside Stable to the East, and Lake Floria
• Further East, and turn South when I reach the ocean, Lurelin village, which has also been attacked recently by pirates.
• Go North to the thick forested area, then head East until I reach Floria river, then turn North until I reach a rain forest, where I’ll find the Zonai ruins. Above the ruins is a thundercloud that may have something in it.
• (Direction?) to Lake Hylia, which has a bridge that is guarded by a large monster, I assume the Flame Gleeok that I saw earlier from afar.
• South to the Southern Shoreline, where I’ll find Martha’s Landing, Kono Shoreline, and Puffer Beach, where there are flying monsters that can keep up with a horse.

Someone else mentions a giant white stallion, which has been seen near the Lake of the Horse Goddess, which is to the Southeast.

I am interested in heading to the Zonai ruins, because that sounds like it could further me in the main quest, and I mount up on a horse, and try to head out in that direction, but I misremember what they told me and try to head East instead. Only, the way the roads twist around in this area, even going East is too much for me, and I end up going West instead.But first, I run into a Korok who needs help meeting up with his buddy, so I help him. And then not very far along the trail I’m trying to follow, I find another korok in need, and help him. Both of these are easy tasks, not a big deal. It’s a bit annoying to have to dismount from the horse, help the korok, call the horse, resume riding, but I get four Korok seeds out of it, so hey.

Then I discover a new well, go down it, and find a sleeping Hylian girl who doesn’t wake when I try talking to her, but says something in her sleep about a storm and a fox. I have no idea what it means. I leave a “person” marker on the map and figure I’ll come back sometime if I ever figure out any more clues.

Then I go down the road and to the West, where I find another Addison, needing help posting his sign, an easy enough task, and I get some rupees and some food for my trouble.

I end up running into the pirate ship, and so I decide to help out there, because hey, I’m here and why not. The monster fighting crew consists of a ragtag bunch of Hylians who don’t look like they can fight too well, plus a Goron who at least looks like he can hit hard and take a hit. They’re standing off, looking at a ship moored in the river, as though uncertain of what to do about it. I talk to the one mounted on horseback, who turns out to be their leader, and she tells me that they can’t board the ship because the bridge to board became broken, and if it were repaired they would be able to attack.

I go up to ship, and look at the bridge, and try to re-attach it to the point where it broke, but it refuses to re-attach. So I guess I’m supposed to find some construction materials nearby and fix this thing some other way? But there’s nothing nearby.

I’m spotted by the monsters on board the ship, and it looks like there’s a decent lot of them, mostly Bokoblins, but also a couple of Moblins. I don’t see a lot of bows and arrows, and no armor, so this isn’t that bad. I fire some arrows at them, since I can’t cross the bridge either, and hit them hard with bomb flowers, which takes them down some. I don’t have a lot of arrows, though. They respond by throwing rocks at me, and eventually the Moblins pick up Bokoblins and throw them at me! They fly over the gap of the broken bridge, and surround me. I expect the companions nearby to start to engage and help me out, but they stand around like they weren’t programmed to handle this contingency, and do nothing. I end up dying, surrounded and unable to dodge or run.

I still have yet to pull of a flurry rush in any combat outside of the practice shrine, because I suck.

I respawn and try again. This time I try using muddle arrows, in addition to bomb arrows, which is super effective. The bomb arrows set the Bokoblins on fire, and also their weapons, and they end up standing too close together, so the flaming weapons burn the Bokoblins standing next to each other, and end up killing a few of them, greatly reducing their threat. Eventually there’s just one Moblin left. I still don’t have a means to cross, but I discover that near the bow of the ship, I can glide down to the anchor, and from there Ascend will let me tunnel up through the ship to the deck, and I’m on board. I finish off the Moblin, attempting to pull off a dodge of any kind that will allow me to practice flurry rush, fuck it up, get hit instead, almost die again, and then just take the Moblin down with regular attacks. FML, but at least it’s done.

The Hylian Monster Crew are thrilled and amazed that I just rushed in and took them all out by myself, and they reward me with 100 rupees. A pretty decent reward. They tell me they’re going to head to the northwest and I might meet them again in the Tabantha region or was it Hebra?

Back on the road, I keep getting turned around and going the wrong direction. It’s really hard to navigate because the roads don’t go straight in any direction, and follow the topology of the land, meandering about in wide curves. Without the map data from the Skyview Tower for the region, I don’t really know where the road leads and therefore I don’t know if I’m heading in the right direction or not. I end up coming down a slope that leads to what looks like the southern shore, and I’m in a beach area, when I spot a blue Lynel. Oh hell no, I turn right the fuck around and get the hell out of there before it can spot me, and head in the opposite direction, back to the pirate ship I just cleared out, taking a path leading around the bow, around a bend to the left, and up some hills.

I find another korok spot along the road, a shimmering patch of lights swirling around 5 statues lined up.

A bit further than that, I discover a shrine puzzle, another Glowing Gem Offering. This time the gem has been discovered already by a Hylian, who tells me he loves horses and he wants to see the Giant White Stallion, so if I bring him the stallion, he’ll let me have the gem.

Fine, OK then so now I really want to find the stallion. I use the Purah scope to look at some horses nearby, there’s a large herd consisting of three groups of three, but none is especially large, nor white.

I still have my horse with me, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to grab the nicest looking solid black horse, who I manage to tame after a few attempts, and ride all the way back to the Stables I came from, and I register it, releasing the 2-star in ever category Pony that I found earlier on, and name this one Blackstar.

I guess I want to try to find the Giant White Stallion next, since it’ll give me another big horse for my stable, and also enable me to unlock a shrine. So that was supposed to be near the Lake of the Horse Goddess, to the southeast of this stable. That’s where I’ll head next. But first I want to go all the way back to where I left my other horse when I captured Blackstar, and get him back.

I run out to where the man guarding the crystal is, which takes a good while, but at least while I do this I retrace my steps successfully and feel like I’ve remembered the route to follow, all the turns in the road to take to get me there. My horse, Horsier, is there waiting for me. I take him all the way back to the Highland Stables, and along the way I find a couple more Koroks. Just as the Stables are in sight, I spot a campfire smoke coming up in the distance, off to the right of the smoke plume coming up from the Stables. I scope it out, and see a small campsite just on the other side of a wooden bridge. I decide to check it out, find another korok before the bridge, and then crossing the bridge a Stone Talus comes to life, somewhere nearby but I don’t see it. The Talus music starts playing, and I hear the earth quaking, but it must be up a hill or something, because I can’t see it. This concerns me, so I spur my horse to sprint across the bridge, and we get away.

I talk to the two men who have camped here, and they are interested in the Horse God (I thought it was a Goddess?) and the Giant White Stallion, who they say has been spotted nearby in this area. But they say that the Horse God has departed from this lake, and is rumored to be… elsewhere… they said where, but I can’t recall what they told me now that I’m writing this.

I continue forward and see the Giant White Stallion at end of a narrow strip of land, surrounded by shallow ponds, surrounded by steep ridges of rock, creating a horseshoe-shaped corral of sorts. There are many butterflies and frogs here, so I spend a few minutes collecting as many as I can, taking advantage of the dense concentration, and end up picking up a bunch of them.

Then I try mounting the Great White Stallion.

In BOTW, the Giant Horse is a lot harder to tame. I think I had two full Stamina rings when I finally succeeded. The Giant Horse in BOTW spawns in an wide open area in the mouth of a canyon leading to Gerudo Desert, and in the vicinity of a pair of Lynels. He’s skittish and runs easily, and just mounting him requires speed or stealth, or a drop from above tactic, involving climbing a baobab tree. Then taming it requires hammering the LZ button really fast, while consuming Stamina foods or elixirs to outlast the horse until it calms down and breaks. I had to try it a dozen or more times, and then once I managed to calm the Giant Horse, I still had to ride back past the two Lynels, who I was yet unready to face, and ride a horse who is not capable of sprinting past two of the most powerful enemy in the game, while it was still not fully attuned to me and liable to panic and buck me off. Once past those two Lynels, there’s a pack of mounted Bokoblins who you have to get through, and it’s a long run to get to the nearest Stables.

In TOTK, the Giant White Stallion is comparatively docile, and easy to sneak up on, doesn’t run far if you do spook him, and therefore quite easy to mount. Calming him down is possible pretty quickly, and then getting back is simple. You’re very close to Highland Stables, and the only potential risk is waking the Talus near the bridge, but you can just keep plodding on and ignore it.

It’s dead easy, not really a challenge at all. Maybe I just learned a lot from BOTW, but even so, the setup and situation is much, much less challenging, and I manage to calm the horse on my second attempt, with just one potion, and make it back to the Stables and register him without any problem.

On the way back to register him, I stop to chat with the two men who were interested in the Giant Horse, and they are amazed and impressed. They’re still looking for the Horse God, and say they will go elsewhere (I forget, Hebra? Tabantha? Somehow I’m thinking the northwest) to look for him.

We then ride out to the campsite where the Shrine Gem is, and I show the man my horse. He’s impressed and gives me the gem, and I carry it back over to the location of the Shrine, unlock it, and claim my Light of Whatever.

Outside the shrine, I notice a glider, a control yoke, three batteries, and two fans, right near what looks like a pretty ideal launching point. I decide I must try this and see how far it takes me, even though it means leaving my Giant White Stallion behind.

I assemble the vehicle, lift it into the air, and drop it, then use Recall to reverse its drop so that it levitates up into the air, hop on and activate the fans, and it takes off. It’s off balance and awkward, i’m constantly adjusting course up and down with the control yoke, but I head in a roughly straight direction heading out from the launch point, just to see where it will take me if I go in that direction.

The three batteries give me a lot of range, and despite my wobbly course, I get out pretty far, until I can see… the Highland Stables dead ahead. I’m heading back to the Stables. The batteries run out, one by one, and then all I have left is my own Zonai power pack, and when that runs out, I jump off the vehicle and glide the rest of the way.

I actually land right on the roof of the Stable, which has nothing special of interest hidden there. It seems that the TOTK designers decided not to put something interesting on the top of every climbable thing, like they did in BOTW, which I think maybe is a design decision to cut down on the tendency to be distracted by exploring every interesting-looking peak, rock, or tree to look for treasure chests and koroks, and keep you more interested in the storyline and main quests. I think it’s a good move, to be honest.

Anyway, since I’m at the Stables, I figure why not try to board the horse that I have out, and I ask the man, and sure enough I can board my Giant White Stallion, even though he’s miles away back where I left him.

So, I guess I just learned that riding Horsier all the way back in order to board him after catching that new wild horse was kind of a waste of time, then. But it really wasn’t, because doing that led to finding some koroks, the location of the Giant Horse, and got me more familiar with the region and the roads. So it’s worth it for those things.

I’ve accomplished quite a few things here, now. The Stable manager keeps mentioning the Dark Cloud to the northeast, so it seems like that’s probably the next thing I should check out. Which, at the start of this thing, was what I had been intending to check out, except for I kept getting turned around and running into other things to do along the way.

So it’s about time I get my directions straight and figure out how to get to this place.

I’m stuck clinging to the side of a steep, slippery sloping green hill, slick with rain at 5:00 AM in an uncharted area of the map in the Farun Grasslands, having raced halfway across Hyrule in order to grab a piece of shooting star that I had seen fall to earth while I was gliding high above in the Sky world level of the map. Having just barely reached the shooting star fragment before it tumbled into the sea to be lost forever, the rains started, and there I was, unable to climb or gain any traction.

Or so it seemed. I discover that, at least on slopes this gentle, I’m able to press B to cancel out of climbing without falling or sliding downhill, and enter into Link’s run animation for a bit, which allows my stamina meter to recover somewhat, and maybe also allows me to make a couple steps of progress, before I again trigger another climbing grab, which I can also use to climb a short distance, and press B to cancel out of before the rain causes me to slip and lose that progress.

I can’t use the Purah Pad telescope while in climbing mode, but when I stand I can turn it on, and once I get to a spot where I’m stable, I take the opportunity to look around out from where I am. Although I’m low on the slope, I still have a pretty decent view out into the distance. The slope extends downward to a shoreline of a large body of water, I think it’s a lake. I see a few islands, and I can see the opposite shore beyond. It’s still dark, and rainy, so I can’t make much detail, everything’s just dark shapes and silhouettes. But off to my left, I think to the North, I spot some fires, far in the distance. Thinking they could be signal fires or camp fires, I try to zoom in as well as I can, wondering how they can remain lit during a downpour. As I reach max zoom, I see what appears to be the shape of a huge dragon, with multiple heads! Each of the heads seems to be emitting a flame. I activate the Purah Pad Camera to take a picture, and it identifies the creature as Flame Gleeok. A wave of dread hits me and I realize that eventually I must face this terrible creature. But for now, it’s back to climbing.

It’s slow and a bit of a cheat, but climb-canceling does enable me to get up to a part of the hillside that I can do a true run along, and I’m able to get up to the top of the hill again. By the time I make it to the top, the rain has subsided for a bit. I know that there should be a pool of water that will serve as another trigger point for the story cutscenes that I’m trying to find for Impa’s quest, and I don’t want to move on from this area until I’ve found it, but I have no idea where it is. It’s not at the top center of the geoglyph, as I had hoped, so I just have to start “mowing the lawn” methodically walking up and down until I find it, I guess. Fortunately, I end up stumbling into it right away, along the side to my right as I’m looking down hill.

This story cutscene is a vision of Princess Zelda and King Rauru in the distant past. It appears that Queen Sonia may have died, as it seems Rauru is paying respects to her at a statue. Zelda approaches and they have a conversation about the upcoming battle with the Demon King, which will apparently happen tomorrow. Zelda, being from the future, knows what she and Link discovered deep under Hyrule Castle, and she tries to warn Rauru about the danger, about the outcome. About how now matter how strong or ready they think they are, they won’t have enough strength to defeat the Demon King permanently, and Zelda tries to warn Rauru that although the Demon King will survive, he will not.

Rauru’s duty is to his kingdom, and he must try, he says. And, besides, Zelda’s memories are from a future that may not happen, because in that timeline she had not yet been sent into the past. So there must be a reason why she has been sent back, and he believes that it will change the outcome.

As the vision fades, it occurs to me that these pools that I’m finding, that trigger these visions, must be the titular “Tears” of the Kingdom.

I’d like to get the map data for Faron, and I look around for the Skyview Tower for the region, but when I find it, I realize I’ve been to it already but it was out of order with no apparent puzzle to solve, and it’s on the far end of the zone from where I am standing. So it’s likely to be a waste of time to go back there, although who knows, maybe not, and if I walk it and meander I could run into some adventure or at least pick up some forage.

I climb to the highest point in the immediate vicinity, and I notice the earth seems to quake. At first I think I just imagined it, and then I feel it again. A very light rumble on the controller, and the camera shakes as though something very heavy hit the ground, causing a small tremor. Talus? Giant footsteps? Sky islands falling? It seems periodic and regular, and doesn’t seem to be increasing or diminishing.

Clearly it’s a clue about something but I don’t know what. It’s raining again and dark to where I can’t see far.

Off in the distance I do see something – – a laser beam? A thin orange finger of light, and an explosion. I take a closer look, it’s a short distance away, and might be the cause of the tremor. I see what it is, a Soldier Zonai and a blue bokoblin are engaged in combat. Then I see a second pair squaring off near them. It’s 2 on 2, and they seem evenly matched, but I want to take the bokoblin down, so I swoop in, and take it with a bullet time headshot with my bow, just as it put a killing blow on the Zonai. I claim the item drops and look for the other pair, but they seem to have mutually destroyed each other.

The Zonai were apparently guarding a chunk of sky land that had fallen to earth. I climb it using Ascend, and find a treasure chest containing a nice Zonai weapon.

The tremors haven’t stopped, so the combat couldn’t have been the cause of them.

I scan the horizon again, and spot a new Skyview Tower in the distance, on the far side of the Gleeok bridge. It’s in the distance beyond the bridge, but the bridge isn’t on the path between my position and the bridge; the bridge is a perpendicular road that crosses my path if I’m headed to the tower.

On the near side, the lake, with its small islands, the largest has a chasm to the underworld.

Beyond the bridge, I can’t see anything. The bridge is tall and blocks most everything.

I pin the new tower on the map and decide to try to head for it. I glide down, but only make it as far as the small islands in the lake on the near side of the bridge. I decide to explore the chasm and see what lies below the earth.

When I jump into the hole, it’s so dark I can’t see the bottom, and I hit hard, and if it weren’t for the Fairy I had in my inventory, that would have been game over.

I get up and look around. I’m on a rise of land, a round hump. Below me is very dark, and I can’t see hardly anything. The reddish glow of Gloom is present in many directions, offering me little choice in which way I can explore. I go as far as I am able on foot in one direction, and come to a wide stretch of Gloom, impassible. I go back the other way, and after a while I reach another broad moat of the stuff. It seems like there is little around here at all, few enemies, and little else beyond a bunch of Poes, which I harvest.

Back near the area where I fell down, there was a ruined area where I saw some Zonai tech, so I go back to it and have a better look. I find there are a variety of parts, including wheels, a platform, a control yoke. I can make a vehicle. I augment it with some pieces that look a bit like shielding, hoping that this may offer me some protection if I do run into an enemy. Finally, some parts I don’t recognize, but I surmise may be batteries. As a final touch, I throw a Brightbloom seed at it, to create a “headlight” that will move with me as I drive through the underworld, and hopefully allow me to conserve resources. Hitting the vehicle with the brightbloom activates the Zonai tech, and the machine runs off without me, unexpectedly.

I get in and after about an hour of awkward false starts where I drive up walls and roll the vehicle over onto me, or get dumped into Gloom bogs, or drive clumsily in circles that take me back to where I started, I finally discover a Light Root, hidden away in a cul de sac, and activate it. It seems there’s no where to go but back out how I arrived.

There seems to be nothing else for me to do, and every time I try to drive in the opposite direction of the cul de sac I end up getting turned around, uselessly, so I eventually give up on this area and quick-travel to the nearest activated shrine to the skyview tower I saw on the opposite side of the bridge being guarded by Gleeok.

When I make it to the Skyview Tower, it’s still out of order, and there’s still no one around to talk to about it, and nothing to give me a clue about what’s wrong with it, so I still can’t unlock the map data for this region.

I try climbing the tower, more to have a look around than because I think it’ll help any. After I get about halfway up, it’s getting dark, and a shooting star falls from the sky, and lands some distance away. This one is close enough for me to run over to, so I glide down from the tower, making a beeline for the crash site. I touch down in the water of a river, swim to the shore, and climb up, and run, run, run, until I make it to the star fragment, and grab it.

I’m a long way from anything now, so I just try screwing around, scouting the area, and trying to find anything of interest nearby.

I don’t remember clearly what comes next, since I’m moving about rather aimlessly and have nothing in particular that I’m trying to accomplish. I keep scoping out the area, looking for anything that looks interesting, be it shrine or tower or anything else for that matter.

Off in the distance, I spot a shrine, and decide to head toward it. As I get closer, I also spot a series of smoke rings coming up from the ground. It looks closer, and more or less on the way, so I veer in that direction. Before I get to the smoke signal, I find a Hylian woman camped by the side of the road. She tells me that she’s the cook from a group of monster fighters who went out ahead to combat some monsters in a pirate ship who attacked a nearby village recently, and suggests if I think I’m good with a sword, to head that way and lend a hand, and gives me a sample dish of her cooking.

I’m not interested in taking that on right now, so I continue heading in the direction of the smoke signals, which from what I can see now is a new Horse Stable. I check it out. There’s a lot of new people to talk to, and they tell me a lot of information about things in the area, in all directions. It is a lot to take in, and I don’t think to take notes as they’re telling me everything. Some of it is stuff I’ve heard rumors about elsewhere, but a lot of it is brand new.

The nearby shrine is my priority, so I ignore all this information and potential sidequests, and head out to unlock the shrine so I can use it for a fast-travel destination when I want to come back this way.

Just outside the Stable, there’s a boy who’s standing up a tree, playing a flute. This is most curious, so I go to climb the tree and talk to him. Maybe he’ll give me his flute? One of the people at the stable told me he was responsible for setting a fire, and he tells me his side of the story. He was trying to make a tree glow in order to impress a girl named Haite, and now he’s sorry for the accident he caused, and is trying to make up for it by trying again, this time with fireflies.

It so happens that I’ve already caught as many fireflies as he needs, so I just give them to him, and then he tells me I should bring Haite to see him, but wait until it’s night time. So I do that, and he puts on a performance with his flute, and the fireflies light up the sky, and Haite is very happy. So the flute kid is happy, too. He tells me he wants to go off to a nearby stable and re-join up with his old band and play with them.

I wonder where this is all going, but I suppose we’ll find out, in time.

Then, I notice a well behind the stable, and decide to check it out, since they’re usually quick and offer a lot of forage pickup, free and easy.

This well turns out to be very different from that. It’s small at first, with not much there. but I notice a bombable wall, and blow it up, which reveals a long, long cavern that extends all the way to the southern shore, coming out onto a beach. The way is very dangerous, with numerous blue bokoblins and a few electric Like LIkes, and I have to be very careful as I make my way through the cave. But the cave is rich with forage items to pick up, and the combat also yields some decent drops, of items that I don’t have many of.

I get to the other end of the cavern and make the Discovery of the cave entrance to the southern shore beach.

Just then, the Blood Moon happens, which annoys the hell out of me, because I had just gotten done with the first real combat test that I’ve chosen to take on in ages only to have all that work undone. Now the cave will be full of monsters again, and dangerous, and I don’t want to fight my way through all that again. So I just step into the entrance of the cave and Ascend to get back up to the top of the ground, and hike it overland back to where the Stable and the shrine is.

I enter the Shrine, and it’s a really easy one. There are a series of challenges where you use Ultrahand to pull back on a swinging paddle that strikes a large steel ball, sending it along rails, to knock it into a bowl, which activates a door.

The first one is dead easy, to introduce the concept. The second one requires additional force, so I glue a large steel box to the back of the swinging paddle, which is an obvious solution, and it works, on the first try.

The third one is a little trickier, but the clue is in the title of the shrine, “longer or wider”. This time the ball is too low for the paddle to reach it, but I can attach a panel to it that will lengthen the paddle. This knocks the ball into a bowl, which releases a cart, which rolls down a rail to my position, and then lands on another section of rail. I’m obviously supposed to get into the cart and ride it to the shrine’s inner chamber. But the paddle won’t hit this cart, either. But if I attach the panel that I used to lengthen the paddle, I can turn it sideways, and it will hit the cart.

This again works, first try, and as I’m rolling up to the inner chamber, there’s a treasure chest that I could try to grab, but I’m facing the wrong way and don’t have time or skill enough to rotate and try to grab it with Ultrahand as I’m rolling past.

I don’t care, because whatever it is, almost certainly isn’t worth much. I’ll come back again to make sure, just to be safe, though.

I complete the challenge and receive the Light of Blessing, of which I now have six.

Do I want more Stamina or more Health?

Outside of the Stable, I can see two more shrines, a good distance away, and I mark them with my scope for later.

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.

Unsure of what to do next, I decide to see what’s up the road from the Fairy Fountain near the Stable I just visited.

Along the way, I spot a hill with a lone tree standing on it, and figuring it must have something of interest, I go off-road to check it out. It’s easy going along lush grassy hills, and I reach the tree, but there’s nothing of interest up the tree.

I guess the designers decided that not every point of interest has to be marked by a lone tree or stone.

Nearby, though, are some ruined buildings, little left of them but some crumbling foundations. I check them out, but as I’m going about it, here come a group of Bokoblins, lead by a Boss. They are blue, and wearing armor made of wood. One of them has a bunch of what look like red chuchu jellies. This group looks formidable. They seem to be heading my way, up the road. I hide and take cover, crouching behind the tree.

The Bokoblins march right up to the area where I was, look around for a moment, and then turn around and head back down the way they came. I wonder: did they come out this way because they thought they saw something? Or was this just a pre-determined route that they were programmed to patrol? Did the tree I spotted, which took me off the road, save me from a face to face encounter with this group?

It seems so.

Since it’s momentarily safe here, I resume scouting the ruins, but I don’t find much. I’m also watching the Bokoblins to see what their behavior is, and observe that they march back down to a little camp they have, and then turn around and head back up the hill.

Here, I discover a well. Since I need a hiding place, it seems a good idea to check out the well. I jump down; there’s no ladder, and I land unhurt in the cave below. Here is another secreted hideaway that someone has been using to grow and cook food items. I take what I find, and read their diary, which tells me that eating fire fruit will give me a boost of strength, but does not protect me against desert heat like in the Gerudo desert.

There’s no way out of the cave, other than to use the Ascend power, which I use, hoping that my timing will be safe, and not pop me up right in the middle of those Bokoblins.

As luck has it, they’re down at their camp when I pop out of the ground.

I decide I should try to see how formidable they are, and plot an attack strategy more clever than simply rushing in and trying to fight them hand-to-hand.

I only have 3 arrows, and I’m trying to stock up, so I decide to try lobbing bomb flowers at them. The range doesn’t seem to be too great, but I don’t have a huge amount of experience with aiming, other than throwing brightbloom seeds underground. But fortunately that seems to be enough experience, because my aim and my range are both true, and I manage to score hits on the group. Two of the Bokoblins are greatly injured by the first bomb, and one of them dies from the fire. A bonus, they seem to drop the fire chuchu jelly without it detonating, and don’t bother to pick it up again. They look around, confused, not seeing where the attack came from, and eventually pick up their weapons and resume their march up the hill toward my location. So I lob another bomb, which takes out the remaining Bokoblins and does some more damage to the Boss. I lob one more, and it only hurts the Boss a little, despite hitting him directly. But since it is down to just him I decide I should be brave and finish him off with my weapons.

I glide down from the hill and use a dive attack, which does splash damage. There’s one more Bokoblin who I somehow didn’t see, behind his Boss, and my attack deals damage to both of them, and fortunately it’s enough to take out that surprise Boko. The Boss drops his huge sword, giving me a further advantage, which I lose immediately by accidentally activating my telescope, making me effectively blinded for near vision, and I get hit by the Boss, hard. The blow takes me to 1/4 hearts, and knocks me on the ground. Annoyed, I pause the game, swear a bunch, and then eat enough food to bring me back up to full life, knowing that if I get hit by that thing again, the only thing that will save me will be if my life meter is full. I get up and switch weapons to my Royal Claymore which I’ve fused with a Bokoblin skeleton arm, and is my strongest weapon. The arm breaks off with the first hit, but fortunately the second finishes the Boss, and I’m victorious.

It’s a win with very little meaning attached to it; I’ve consumed weapons and food, and gained little beyond a few monster parts, and some experience with fighting these enemies.

I don’t think to check out their camp to see what else I might get, and instead I think about where I could go next.

I decide rather than trying to complete some of the quest objectives in the immediate area of this stable, I will try going back to Kakariko Village and see if I can make any progress with my open quests there.

There’s the old woman who is sick with Gloom, and I’ve found some ingredients in the underworld that might work to create a cure for her. There’s also the four Ring Ruins, which I need to visit and see the stone glyphs. And the fifth Ring Ruin, which is off limits. I wonder if I can find a way to sneak in, or perhaps visiting the four will unlock the fifth to me.

I fast travel back, and arrive in the middle of the night, in a rainstorm, at the Shrine nearby. I glide down and find the old woman’s daughter who cares for her, and try talking to her again, but her responses haven’t changed; she doesn’t seem to notice that I have ingredients that might help. So maybe I don’t have the right ingredients after all. Or maybe I need to cook them into a porridge for her? I don’t understand the intended solution; she tells me that she has some of the ingredients — the Hylian Rice and Milk, but doesn’t know what the missing ingredient I need to supply, and doesn’t mention whether she has any Wild Greens. I haven’t seen Wild Greens anywhere, and am not sure where I would look for them, or if Wild Greens is perhaps a category of any kind of vegetable? I am wondering about this. I notice she mentions a merchant who travels on the road to the west of the village who sells the rice and milk, so I decide to try to find him, in case I maybe need to buy them. But based on what she’s telling me, she has that stuff already, which seems to imply that I don’t need to.

In the morning, down in the village I find a girl selling garland wreaths. She says they are for the Ring Ruins, since they resemble them. She seems to suggest that I should carry a garland up to the ruins and lay them there as a tribute, but it looks like a long climb.

I buy a garland from her for 5 rupees, and to my annoyance it is a carryable object, not an inventoryable object. So I can’t run while carrying it, and I can’t climb either. So that’s the challenge. I’m going to have to figure out a way to get a wreath to the place she’s indicating, and it seems like it’ll be a royal pain to do it on foot, and I’m not quite ready to start constructing something with Ultrahand parts to try to get there, either. Maybe another time.

I walk up the road and find the merchant who sells milk and rice, and buy some, just in case. I also find another Addison who wants help holding up a sign, which I take care of for him.

I decide the only other thing I can do right now is try to find Wild Greens, so I get out my axe and start mowing the lawn in the grassy field here. This proves fruitless and I get distracted quickly, and decide to try visiting the remaining Ring Ruins and at least complete that quest.

This takes quite a bit of time and climbing around, but I do eventually manage to complete the required tasks, which I find is easier when I mark the locations on the map that I’ve been to already with stamps. One of the investigation crew who I talked to mentions something about a rare yellow herb that can counteract gloom. I wonder if he means Sundelion, which is rare on the ground but seems to grow in the sky islands above.

As I’m going about this, I find another Korok who needs help reaching his friend, and stop to help him out. It’s a long way, and to make the trip a little shorter, I use a Zonai wing and fans. I saw a tip saying that if you can’t get the wing off the ground due to friction, you can use Recall and Ultrahand to accomplish this, as follows: Use Ultrahand to lift the wing up in the air, then drop it. Stand on the wing, and use Recall, and it will be lifted off the ground, in reverse of your lifting action with the Ultrahand. Cancel Recall when it reaches the height you need, and hit the fans or rockets you’ve attached, to take off.

This works well enough, but only gets me about halfway there. But it does cross a rather steep valley that would have been difficult climbing for me had I tried to carry the Korok over my head, so I think this is a win.

I get the two korok seeds for my reward, and then turn around and re-use the wing to travel back the way I came. But as luck has it, it runs out of juice and drops me right into the chasm nearby Kakariko Village. I glide to avoid falling down into the underworld, but land in a pile of Gloom, and take some damage from it.

Fortunately I get out of the Gloom before I take more than 2 hearts of damage, and I’m OK.

I walk the rest of the way back to the village, running into a Blue Bokoblin in the wooded area that has a lot of good forage items that I used to visit a lot near the fairy fountain in BOTW. I wonder if the fairy is still here, or not, but I think the Ring Ruins may have covered that particular location up.

At any rate, I return and talk to the man in the village who was interested in the stone glyphs on the Ring Ruins, and we share information. They give clues about elemental powers like Time and Light and so on, and special rocks that can harness this power, and Sages who fought the Demon King in the past. They seem to be clues to how to defeat the Demon King, but it’s all pretty vague.

But that’s about it. It doesn’t do anything to unlock the 5th Ring Ruin. I suppose I should find Tauro and try talking to him.

While I’m in the center of the village, I enter the two shops. One, the ingredients shop, is out of everything. There’s so much tourism to view the ring ruins that they can’t keep anything in stock. But the shopkeeper thanks me for settling the quarrel between the two old men who bickered about the merits of offense and defense, and gives me a carrot as a reward to completing a sidequest I didn’t even know about.

The other shop is an arrow shop, and I need arrows. I have something over 100 rupees, but I’m trying to save those up as well, and knowing I can farm arrows by getting near Bokoblin archers, I think I’ll hold off buying them for now.

Night comes and I decide to go back to the sick woman in the village. One of the villagers is tending a garden nearby, and tells me about her plum trees. Part of the garden is given to a research project to try to grow more Sundelions. I can’t pluck this particular Sundelion, as with all of the other vegetable gardens in the village, I’m not allowed to plunder them. But I have Sundelions, and I decide to cook one.

Just one creates a Sunny Wild Greens recipe, which is good for warding off Gloom. So that clues me in. I go back to the daughter of the sick woman and offer her a Sundelion, but she doesn’t do anything with it. So I pick it up and cook it with Rice and Milk, and this produces Sunny Greens Porridge, which cures the grandmother.

Now that she is well, her daughters are happy. They bring the prices in the clothing store down, and one of them tells me she is going to Hateno to study fashion. I’ve completed that side quest, and now I can buy some clothes… once I have enough money, but they’re still much too expensive for me to buy at this time. I only have about 100 rupees, and the cheapest thing is about 500. There’s two sets of clothing, one for stealth, one for radiant, and together they’ll run about 3000 or so.

I still don’t know what else I can do about gaining access to the fifth Ring Ruin, which seems to be very important. I recall that in BOTW, Kakariko village had a large stone orb in the Chief’s house, which I wasn’t allowed to touch for the longest time, and I had to wait a long time to be able to do anything with that. I wonder if this could be the same type of deal?

I talked to the man who was interested in the four Ring Ruins, and that completed a side quest, but now he doesn’t seem to be interested in them any further, and is just a tourist, not an official on the investigation committee.

I’ve talked with Tauro, Calip, and Paya, and they all are interested in the mystery but are heeding Princess Zelda’s orders, so nothing has changed there. I talk to everyone else I can find, including two tourist girls who are as curious as I am, but neither of them seems to be helpful. I return to one of the ring ruins and find the man sleeping on the stone tablet, who is dreaming of Hearty Truffles. Fortunately I now happen to have one in my inventory, so I take it out and place it on him, which wakes him up, and he leaves. I’m able to take the Truffle back, too.

But none of that does anything to further move the plot along.

It seems I may have done about all I can in Kakariko for now. But there will be more to do later, at some point.

Unsure how to proceed in Kakariko, I decide to do some more exploring, and see if I can unlock more of the map. I have a look at the map, and notice a geoglyph in an unmapped part of Hyrule that I’ve been through, but haven’t unlocked the tower for. I decide I’ll try to do that, and fast travel to a nearby tower from which I can launch into the air and try to glide as far into that uncharted region as possible before I have to touch down.

I easily make it across a river and reach a position directly over the geoglyph, and decide to land. It turns out that this is one is the first one that I had discovered, even before Impa told me to investigate these. So this does nothing to further my quest, but it gives me a realization that makes me feel a bit more oriented, I recognize someplace that I’ve been to before.

Nearby, there’s a familiar looking woman with a horse cart, and a tall climbable watch tower. I decide to go up it, and use it to glide as far as I can toward the sky tower for this region, which I have pinned on the map. I do this, and get maybe halfway to the tower. I come down on a steep hillside and climb up, and immediately find myself in trouble, as I’m right near a bokoblin tree stand. This particular stand is actually built on top of a Stone Talus, which comes to life, and the Battle Talus comes at me. These Bokoblins are well armed, with flame projectors and red chuchu jelly, and I’m completely unprepared for this. I just run for it, and get away, gliding off the hilltop, into a river valley below. Continuing away from the Battle Talus would take me further from the Tower I’m trying to get to, and also will put me in danger of a Stalnox I see crashing about in the night. The only way to go then, is down through the valley the other way, back toward where the Battle Talus was, and hope that they aren’t clever enough to rain rocks and fire down on me from up there.

They do not, but I do run into an angry apple tree that uproots itself and comes at me. It’s raining, so my fire equipment doesn’t do much damage, but I do throw a red chuchu jelly at it, causing it to combust, but only briefly. I pull out my stone axe and cut it down the rest of the way, earning a bunch of apples and some wood.

I proceed around the base of the river valley, trying to find a way up the other side to get closer to the Tower. It doesn’t take long for me to find an approach that will work; I climb back up the bank to get altitude, on the hill where the Battle Talus was. Then, I jump and glide over to the other side, and grab the wall of the ravine, and climb up.

I’m right where the Tower is, and it’s unguarded in the middle of an open field. It’s doors even open for me as I try to open them. Unfortunately, the control panel seems to be on the fritz and is blinking, and I can’t use it or fix it. There’s no one around, so I don’t know what to do.

I guess I’ll figure it out later. I look around and notice a shrine a ways off, a bit of a distance but not terrible, so I go to unlock it so I can at least fast travel back to here and return more easily later. Along the way, I find a korok who needs help, but I don’t bother with him after finding out that his friend is way past the shrine that I wanted to go to first. I’ll come back for him later. I mark his location on the map, and proceed to the shrine.

The shrine is a pretty fun one, a series of challenges based on rails. The first section is easy, I just need to place a steel plate on the rail and ride it down. The next challenge is a bit more difficult, this time the rails curve and go down a steep hill, and I need to add some side guides to keep it from falling off. But this too isn’t terribly difficult, and I make it over on the second attempt. It’s a good idea to test your vehicles before you ride them yourself, just to know what’s going to happen and see how they’ll fail.

The third challenge is tougher. There’s a double rail, running parallel from the platform I’m on, and they end over a big bottomless pit, where I’m supposed to somehow transition to a new rail, a single rail positioned in the middle. For propulsion, there are some Zonai fans that i can attach to it, giving it some power

I try creating a box, to completely enclose the rail on all sides, so the vehicle can’t fall off, but this only gets me halfway across before the box ends up tilted too much for me to stay on, and I fall. The solution instead of creating a box is to create a triple guide, with guides on both sides and one in the center. This accomplishes the transition perfectly, the center guide going between the middle rail that I need to transition to, and keeps it level and balanced so that I have an easy, gentle ride to the end.

I claim the Light of Blessing.

Now what?

I emerge from the Shrine and it’s raining so hard visibility is very poor, and it is dark.

It occurs to me that I didn’t try climbing the Sky Tower to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it. So I head back and attempt to do that. I glide much of the way, and get out of the rain as I do so. I reach the tower, and I manage to scale it, which isn’t easy, but with my extra stamina upgrades I’m just able to do it, although I have to rest a few times at places I find where standing is possible. Just as I reach the top, it starts raining, so hard that it’s just as before, very difficult to see much. But I’m very high up and I have a good view, anyway. I spot a shrine, far to the South, and pin it on the map. I also see another Geoglyph, one that I’ve marked on the map with a pin already, but one that I have not yet been to.

I decide to go back to the underworld to scout a bit more and try to light up more Light Roots and collect Poes.

I get a bunch of Poes and spend a long time down there, and explore some territory that is dark on the map, but can’t find a Light Root to wake up to open up the map any more than I have it.

I spent a long time down there, and had relatively few encounters. I did see a huge creature called a Frox (?) I think it was. It looked like a Hinox sized Frog, or maybe a bit like a Molduga. It was seriously whale sized. I avoided it, not keen on getting myself killed not knowing how to fight something I haven’t seen before, when I’m only trying to farm and scout.

Eventually I run out of arrows and decide to give up on trying to find another Light Root in the south west region of the map, and Fast Travel back to Lookout Landing.

There’s a nearby map tower to the west, which I have had pinned for a long time; the one inside the Bokoblin fortress. I decide it’s time I tried to get it unlocked.

I fast-travel to the nearest shrine that gets me most of the way there, and then run up. I take a dumb, frontal assault approach, and hope that I can handle it.

I really should be able to, but I can’t. I get flustered with the controls and the camera especially, when I’m trying to use weapon focus.

Just about all of my weapons are augmented to be two-handed, so I basically don’t use shields, and this also messes me up. The lack of shield is one thing, and then on top of it the slower weapon. I do have good reach and do very good damage, though, which slightly makes up for it.

I run up the wooden ramp to the fortress hill entrance, and encounter a blue Bokoblin, who I destroy quickly with my melee weapon, which breaks. I’m supposed to face a Moblin next, but he somehow triggers some explosive barrels and blows himself up, kindly enough. I press the initiative, and make it into the fortress, where there are three Bokoblins on the ground, carrying shields, and a Boss Bokoblin, and another Bokoblin or two on watch towers, armed with bows.

I select bombs and throw one, because it’s the most effective way to deal damage to a massed group, particularly when they are armored. This is effective against the little Bokoblins, who all catch fire and die within a bomb or two. The Boss Bokoblin is tougher and doesn’t take much damage from the bomb. I can’t figure out what else I can use against him that will be effective. He’s big, moves quickly, has a long reach, and does heavy damage. He’s also not a base red, but a more upgraded version. I keep running, hoping to get some distance and continue throwing bombs at him, because I have a bunch of bombs from my underworld farming run, and they’re not doing much damage to him. I’ve hit him with 5-6 bombs, and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m failing to hit him, and he’s getting shielded by the surrounding terrain and walls, or what it is. I try to switch over to fire seeds, but I’m getting flustered and panicked, and keep running into fucking walls which causes the camera to glitch out, hiding the wall that I’m running into, and making it seem like I’m stuck on something invisible. I manage to survive a good while despite this, and at one point I climb over the inner palisade wall just as the Boss Bokoblin is coming around the corner to get me, and it seems like this is a great move, but I can’t capitalize on it, I’m all turned around and confused as fuck, and I am frustrated as fuck that the camera isn’t fucking cooperating with me to look where I need it to in order to be able to figure out how I need to move and where I can run to to get an advantage. I don’t care what, pick up a dropped weapon, cover to protect me, a thing I can grab with Ultrahand, anything!

Eventually I fuck up one too many times and get clobbered by the Boss Bokoblin, who seems to be the only one left standing, and I get the Game Over screen.

I Continue, and respawn directly in the middle of the fortress, and square in front of the door of the sky tower. Wow wouldn’t that have been great if I could have fucking found the fucking front door and walked in, like I’m doing right now, just before I got killed in the last fight? Then I would have seemed awesome. Instead I feel like I suck. But I’m more pissed again at the camera for continually messing me up. This is 2023 and 3D games have been around for 30 years, and we should have better camera control.

I need someone to explain to me WTF I’m not getting, because I watch people who are competent with BOTW run fantastically well, and I know it can be done. I was starting to get decently good toward the end of 300+ hours playing BOTW, but my skills are rusty, and I’m not as good as I was.

I do get the tower activated, which is my goal, and I shoot up and scan the terrain to update my map. So, Mission Accomplished, then.

While I’m up in the sky, I have no reason to go back down to where I came from, and probably a few good reasons to not do that, so I opt to glide toward the nearest sky island, and land on it. This gets interesting.

There’s a couple island hops, and I make it to a place that has a floating movable platform that I can glue some rockets to, which I can aim to take me across a fairly wide gap to a nearby sky island at the same altitude. I do this, and find another, similar platform, which can get me about halfway to the next sky island. When I get to that point, the rockets give out, and I’m stuck but I’m high enough that I should be able to glide in to the next sky island. But I see a huge humanoid made of boxes stomping around. It looks like a robot of Zonaite origin, and I imagine it’s going to be hostile, and I don’t feel in any way prepared to deal with this thing, especially now that I’m completely out of arrows.

I have little choice but to go for it, so I Save, and glide in. I try throwing bombs at the thing, but they’re minimally effective, if at all. Melee weapons are a joke as well, and going toe to toe with this colossus is no way to stay alive. I am mostly running, sprinting and then resting to regain my stamina, trying to stay a few steps ahead of the thing. I have my back turned to it most of the time and can’t actually see what it’s doing, which is part of what messes me up win combat. If I try to use the Left Z trigger to focus, it doesn’t seem to help, and causes me to run slower, making me vulnerable to its attacks. I’m not good at dodging to trigger bullet time, either, because I don’t know it’s attacks.

I’m starting to panic again, but for now I’m managing to keep a step ahead of it. I switch my arm power to Ultrahand, and use it to grab on to one of its boxes. I try to target the head but I’ll take any old piece. I manage to rip a few off, and even manage to grab the head one time. This seems to cause the Construct to fall apart, disrupting it temporarily. I run up to the one box that is glowing, I guess it’s the heart or something, and I do a spin move attack, using all my stamina, with my hardest hitting weapon, and manage to knock off maybe a tenth of its life bar.

Then it reforms itself and I have to run again.

So basically this thing has me seriously outclassed, and if I mess up even once it’s going to kill me, and I probably don’t have enough weapons to take it down even if I broke all of them on it.

I decide to try to grab pieces of it and throw them off the edge of the sky island, to see what that does. This is hard because I can’t run fast with Ultrahand, so mostly I can grab a box, swing around, extending the range of the grab as far as I can, and get a box close to the edge, before I have to drop it and run to get away from an attack. But I manage to do this a bunch of times, and eventually I do manage to dump one of the boxes off the edge. Maybe if I do this to all the boxes, I’ll win?

I think doing this triggered it to adopt a new mode, and instead of coming at me in the form of a humanoid composed of boxes, it turns into a cube, like a 3×3 Rubik’s Cube of Death, and starts tumbling at me, like a huge boulder in an Indiana Jones movie.

I’m really having a hard time keeping away from it now, and I don’t know how much longer I can keep dodging it like this. At this point, it’s attacks are coming at me so fast I don’t really have any time to counter attack effectively, and my tactic of ripping pieces of it off, while seeming to be somewhat effective, is now too difficult to sustain.

As I’m running around, I happen to notice a chest laying on its side on the ground. I have no time to wonder where it came from, but I do manage to run up to it and open it, and its contents are revealed: an Old Map.

It marks a location on my Purah Pad map, and I have no clue what this is for, or what I’ve discovered. I now just want to survive, so I dash for the edge of the sky island and dive off, falling a good ways before I trip my glider, and glide away to safety.

I land OK, and I’m on the Great Plateau in central Hyrule, the starting region in BOTW.

As I’m coming in for my landing, there’s a shrine nearby, and I head for it, landing right on it, and go in.

This shrine is a challenge to use motion from turning cogwheels by gluing sticks to the cogwheels with Ultrahand in ways that will engage them with other parts of the shrine to do useful work.

I connect to cogs with a rod, and get them turning to open a door. Then there’s a puzzle to figure out how to get these wheels to raise two platforms that are riding along a vertical rail. A combination of gluing rods to the cog wheel and using vertically placed rods so that the first platform raises the second works for me. I wonder if that’s the intended solution or not, but it works effectively and seems straightforward enough.

I collect my Light of Blessing, and exit. There’s another shrine nearby as well, that I saw as I was coming in to land, but I lost track of it when I landed at the Shrine I’m at now, which is nestled inside of a rocky ridge.

I climb up over the ridge hoping to see that other Shrine, but the first thing I see is a yellow Wizzorobe, and without arrows I’m in no way prepared to deal with it, so I hide and take a long way around the zone it is patrolling.

I figure I’m so disoriented now that I won’t be able to find the second shrine I saw, but I end up coming up right near it, and just have to glide over a little, then climb a bit to get to it.

This shrine is the most complicated one I’ve seen. There’s moving platforms, a spinning wheel, a huge steel ball falling that I need to redirect somehow toward a large bowl in the floor to trigger the shrine’s inner chamber to open. It seems more complicated than it really is. I need to use Ultrahand to create a platform to attach to a rising and falling platform, which I ride like an elevator to a higher level. From here there’s a fan in the floor blowing air upward, which I can use to glide over to another platform, where I see the ball falling. There’s pegs stuck in the wall, which I can manipulate with Ultrahand, to change the path the ball takes. The next part involves positioning a peg to get the ball to fall into a spinning platform that will dump the ball into a curved bit of rail, but the spinning platform is spinning the wrong way. This is easily handled with the Recall ability, but getting the timing is a little tricky, as the ball has to be falling just as the spinning platform is in the right position to catch the ball, and roll it into the curved rail section.

The ball doesn’t have enough momentum to roll up the curved section of rail to land in the bowl, and needs help, but that’s straightforward. The wall has a large spinning wheel, and the curved rail seems to perfectly match the bottom circumference of this wheel. I just need to use Ultrahand to pin a platform to the wheel, in such a way that it will push the ball up the rail and into the bowl.

This works perfectly, and then the only remaining challenge is to get back over to the starting platform so I can enter the inner chamber and collect my Light of Blessing.

When I emerge from this shrine, I’m right by a Stable, so I go to it. It’s Outskirt Stable, and there’s a lot going on here. There’s a Fairy Fountain right near here, but the Fairy has locked itself inside, and hasn’t come out since the Upheaval. There’s talk that the Fairy loved music and may need to hear a song played for it to entice it to return. The Stable keeper mentions a place called Diggdogg Bridge, and says that the largest Zonai ruins fell near there, and says I should check it out.

It seems like there’s going to be a lot of new information and sidequests here.

The walls have some interesting posters on them as well. There’s a cooking recipe, and a map of Hyrule with some large trees indicated at various locations on the map. I take pictures of both with my Purah Pad for later reference.

Behind the Stable, there’s a well, and I go down to explore it. I’m a bit surprised to find a young woman in there, talking to herself. I startle her, but she is friendly and says she is a Well Enthusiast. She says that there are 58 Wells in Hyrule, and tells me that she will give me 10 rupees for each one I tell her about. I’ve been to four, so far, so I get 40 rupees from her. She tells me she is going to the one in Lookout Landing next, so I should go there if I want to see her again. OK.

This well is especially good because it has fairies in it, and I manage to capture three, along with some glowing mushrooms and glowing cave fish, and some sticky frogs that I can use to make myself stick to wet surfaces while climbing, which sure sounds like a great idea.

After I leave the well, I visit the Fairy Fountain, and the Fairy indeed tells me that she needs to hear the sound of a flute before she will open her bud and come out again. She also mentions having a sister in another part of the world, although I neglected to remember where.

Where am I going to find a flute? Or a flute player? Some of the people at the stables mentioned a traveling group of musicians, maybe they have something to do with it. I wonder where they are…