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Down the road a short distance from the Lucky Clover News, there’s a Shrine standing off the road, overlooking the large crater-like geography where Rito Village stands. It is surrounded by thorn bushes, which are no problem for me since I have several means of creating fire at my disposal.

I burn away the brambles, and enter the shrine. The challenge is not terribly difficult.

Exiting the shrine, I see that I’ve ascended a gentle slope and now am standing at a level slightly above the lowest pillars of rock which form the foundations of Rito Village. I’m curious if the obstacle to enter is more than that simple wrecked bridge. I know I must have multiple easy means of crossing — create a new bridge out of building materials and Ultrahand; glide over on my glider, even build a zonai vehicle that can fly. But maybe there’s something more to the situation than meets the eye — high winds, or, say a monster of some kind.

I decide to try gliding to the village and find out. I manage it very easily, and land without incident on the small rock pillar just past the fallen bridge, and walk the rest of the way into the Village proper. Picking up pine cones along the way, I come upon a trio of Rito children, practicing their singing. They are about to do a song about the Stormwind Ark and the god — the same story I first learned of when I talked to the Rito at the cabin outpost.

The children tell me that food is scarse in the village, and that many of the adult Rito have fled the village, leaving the children behind to run things. That seems crazy to me, leaving the children behind to freeze and starve? But maybe they are off doing battle against the Upheaval, or doing something else equally dangerous, and the village is really the safest place for the children.

A bit further in, I finda prayer statue, where I can exchange Light of Blessing for Stamina and Heart Container upgrades. I have 11 so I get one of each, and need just one more Shrine to get another. I now have two full rings on my stamina meter, and 8 heart containers. I proceed up the path further into the village, and find the inn and a food store and an armor shop, much the same as they were in BOTW, but with lower stock. I have almost 500 rupees, and buy some food ingredients that I can use for cooking recipes, and then sell off a bunch of mushrooms that I’ve collected an excess of, enough to afford purchase of the body piece of the Rito armor suit. The pants and the helmet are too much for me for now.

I notice right near the armor shop, there’s a Shrine, right here in the village, so I jump over a fence and enter it. This shrine is a flight challenge. Full of large, open chambers with very high ceilings, and fans blowing massive updrafts from far below. I proceed forward, easily navigating the challenges as I’m pretty used to flight by now, but there are a few parts that are a bit tricky, where I have to manage my altitude and descend through an updraft-filled room by diving and then catching myself. I also have to use the bow to take out some Zonai construct soldiers, and am rewarded when each of them drops a bundle of 5x arrows. A treasure chest contains a bow as strong as the weakest in my possession, so I just leave it, and then go into the next chamber to collect the Light of Blessing. Now I can add another heart container to my life meter. I’m not sure how much more stamina I really need now that I have two full rings, but lately it seems that my stamina has not been a limiting factor in the climbing, running, and gliding that I’ve been doing, so I think it’s time to start adding more hearts so that when I am in combat I can survive a bit more easily.

Outside the Shrine, I notice a slight indent in the side of the massive stone pillar that the entire village is built upon, and thinking it might be the entrance to a cave, I investigate it. It turns out to just be a shallow pocket of a cave, but there’s a small boulder which I pick up, and discover a Korok. I try Ascending, and yes, the shallow pocket cave has enough of an overhang that I can zip upward and back into the village again, a nice shortcut.

The remaining Rito children are working hard at keeping things running at the village, and have amazing spirit, but they are cold, hungry, tired, and too few and too young. By talking to them I find two easy side quests that I solve instantly: one Rito wants some icefruit so they can make a recipe with it, another wants icefruit or white chuchu jelly so they can fuse it to an arrow and make an ice arrow. I have both in my inventory and just give them to each, instantly closing the quest. These were intended to teach me about the potential of fusing materials, but I’m already clued into that from doing other side quests and experimenting and paying attention to things.

I find the last two remaining adult Rito: the new village elder, Teba, and his wife and adolescent child, Tulin. The child is ready to become a full-fledged warrior and wants to fly up to the clouds to investigate the storm seen high above, but his father says it’s too high and too dangerous even for adult Rito. The elder suggests I fly out to the Lodge where I can ask a Rito named Harth if he has seen Princess Zelda around.

I’ve already been there, I came from there, so I’m coming through this area kind of backwards, but it doesn’t much matter. The elder points in the direction of the two marker bonfires, and I jump off a ledge and fly out that way again.

At the Lodge, I talk to Harth, and he tells me he hasn’t seen Zelda and has been too busy to look for her, dealing with the cold emergency and hunting food. He suggests I try asking the child of the elder, who he last saw going out on a hunting expedition, and he points the way deeper into the cold frigid wastes, and uphill.

So I guess my choice at the moment is to continue with this, or go back to the newspaper quest. I think the newspaper quest is what will lead me to becoming able to upgrade my clothing, and make me more capable in combat and better able to finish the rest of the game. So perhaps it’s best if I leave Rito Village behind for now and return to that storyline.

Ah, who am I kidding? I go up the mountain path and look for Tulin.

I climb up some ladders and trudge a short distance, and encounter an adult Rito by a small campfire, and they tell me there are many caves in the area, which are good shelter from the cold. The Rito have been using them, and making large bonfires to mark the way for others.

I continue on and spot a couple of ice keese, which I try to kill with my spear, but I manage to get frozen by one of them. Then a bokoblin comes at me from up the hill. I hit him with an arrow, taking him out in one shot before he can get to me. But then another four bokoblins emerge from the right, along with a White Chu Chu. Fortunately, I kill the Chu Chu with an arrow, freezing all of them with its burst of cold. This makes it easy to kill the three red Bokobs, but the last one is blue and has more health, so when I hit him it’s not enough to take him down. He unfreezes, and then swings at me with a weapon that creates a gust of wind that knocks me back, and I go tumbling down the mountain trail, I get up and try to hit him, and he hits me again, doing damage this time, and I am blown back again, almost all the way back to the Rito woman and her campfire. Fed up, I ready my bow when I’m back on my feet, and nail him in the head at point blank range, just as he’s about to swing at me a third time, and this slays him. He drops a Rito sword called the Feathered Edge, which doesn’t have a lot of damage potential, but the gust of wind ability is probably handy. So I drop the honeycomb boomerang I’ve been carrying since the Hylian Plains, trading a swarm of bees for a gust of wind. Some nutjob Boko I fought a long time ago had a bee hive honey comb stuck to a boomerang, and I discovered that when you hit stuff with it, bees come out and swarm it to do a tiny bit of extra damage. But it’s real value is that the bees also distract the target, making it less of a danger to you, and easier to hit with a follow-up attack. It was a clever way early on for the game to tell me I should think about fusion with materials that would seemingly be impractical or even nonsense in the real world. But I haven’t experimented with it all that much so far, really.

Anyway, a little further up the mountain trail, I find a cave marked with bonfires, a Rito camp. I approach and spot another Rito woman, and talk to her. She tells me that Tulin went further into the cave, and I can find him if I go deeper. This cave is full of those brambly thorns, and for the most part I just move cautiously around them rather than try to burn them away. The cave goes pretty far into this mountainside, and I find a lot of forage and minerals to pick up along the way. At one point, I find a frozen over puddle, which I break through, and discover a deeper underground chamber full of even more mushrooms, cave fish, and minerals. I clear it out and continue further into the cave, and there’s a chamber with a gust of wind blowing upward through a vertical shaft lined with brambles. I fly up it and am fortunately not to collide with them, spot a tunnel branching off the top level of the vertical shaft, and make my way toward it.

Here, I encounter a Horriblin, who I take out with my bow. One shot. My strong Zonai bows do a lot of damage, and I hope I can find more of them when these break, because they are kick ass. I proceed further on into the cave, and find another chamber leading up into a tall vertical shaft lined with brambles, this one has a campfire, extinguished, and no updraft. Well that’s plain as day what I need to do, I put down a flint and a hylian pine cone, and light the campfire, it blazes brightly and I glide up the draft, and find the tunnel at the top, and continue onward. This time, I encounter a male Rito standing guard over some supplies they’ve gathered. He tells me that Tulin went ahead impetuously without waiting for help, to try to chase some monsters back to their “nest”.

I push forward, looking for Tulin. The Rito told me that he would be at the top of a mountain with a lone Cedar tree growing on it. I exit the cave, and there’s a trail leading up the mountain. I spot what looks like a small Bokoblin campfire, and come upon two reds and a blue huddling around a fire. I don’t want to screw around, so I just fire a bomb arrow and headshot the blue, killing him, and the bomb blast takes out the reds, so I take out the entire camp with one arrow. That’s what I’m talking about! Unfortunately the bomb blows away most of the stuff I might have looted from this campsite, but there is one treasure chest, which I open and discover a weaker bow than I have, but it’s a Rito bow that has rapid fire capability which is useful when flying, because bullet time takes so much stamina to get shots off. But I leave it behind, not wanting to give up my other bows. There are a couple of large crates, which I bust open and find an arrow in each. It’s weird how these giant 5 foot by 5 foot crates only have a single arrow or apple in them all the time.

Then I notice down the hill slightly, there’s Addison, holding up a sign. It’s crazy. He’s not dressed for cold, although he says he ate some chili peppers, so that explains it. I try to help him but I just busted up the only boxes around that I could have used to help hold up the sign. Nearby I spot some snowballs, but they just roll off the mountainside when I try to stick them together, and splatter far below. The only other thing I can find is a big boulder. Normally I have to use 2 or 3 things glued together to hold up his sign, but this time I am super lucky, and the one boulder holds the sign up by itself. I don’t know how, I just placed it perfectly I guess.

He rewards me, and then I continue back to my mission to find Tulin. I climb up the mountain some more, and encounter a large Boss Bokoblin and an entourage of small bokos. I duck behind a rock and let them pass, they don’t notice me, and I am relieved. Probably I’ll have to deal with these guys eventually, but in these snow covered trails, I can’t move very fast, and would be quickly surrounded and pounded into jelly by that group if I had to fight them on level ground out in the open.

I climb up the mountain some more, taking a shortcut by climbing directly rather than spiraling around the peak using the path.

Here, I finally find Tulin. I spot the Cedar tree, and just past it, looking out into the abyss surrounding the peak, is Tulin. He’s lost his bow to an Aerocuda, and cursing his luck. His spirits pick up when he sees me, and he asks me for help getting his bow back. He tells me he can give me aid by creating a gust of wind that can propel me forward, so I jump out and glide toward the Aerocuda, and use the gust to boost me but it doesn’t really seem to do much to help. I end up landing on the side of another mountain peak, one with a flatter area, a piece of stone that looks like Sky Island that fell from above. I climb up it, and take aim at the Aerocuda who is flying just above me, but somehow doesn’t seem to have noticed me at all still. My aim is good, and one shot is all it takes. The Aerocuda drops the bow and dies, and before it hits the ground Tulin swoops in and grabs it.

Just then, two adult Rito emerge from the darkness and tell us they saw everything. Tulin is ashamed for having been impulsive and disobeying, and for losing his bow and not being able to handle the monsters by himself. But he says he learned that teamwork is what really wins battles, not taking risks. The adult Rito tell him that now that he has learned this, he has matured enough that he is finally ready to be a Rito warrior.

So now the Rito warriors want me and Tulin to investigate the storm cloud. They know that there is something in there, and want us to check it out and find out what it is. They say it is impossible to get into the storm clouds from the side due to the high winds, and the only way in is from the top, but no one else but Tulin has the flying skill to be able to do it.

This seems a bit weird, because to me Tulin seems like he’s maybe 12-13 years old, and they’re acting like he’s the equivalent of a 17-18 year old who’s just become a man. But it’s cool; this is what we’re supposed to do, complete quests and stuff.

So I guess the next step in this quest is to go into the Hebra sky islands and find out way up to that storm. I have been up there and I kind of think I know where to go, but it’s distorienting to get around up there and I’m not sure if I can find that place where I saw all the long ships again.

It’s been a while since I’ve played. Probably a week. I’ve been busy.

Last time I played, I was on the Eldin region and explored a bit there, and unlocked the map before deciding I need to get to Rito village and start completing quests there if I want to get anywhere in the game.

I’m trying to figure out how to open up the Fairy Flowers that I’ve found, so I can upgrade my outfits and start to have a chance in combat against tougher monsters and groups.

I fast travel to the Hebra Skyview Tower, and blast off into the sky. I am hoping to get as deep into the winter lands as I can on a glider and minimize travel time to Rito village.

Up in the sky, though, of course I get other ideas immediately. To the west, there’s an archipelago in the sky, and I can see a shrine on it, which I’ve already pinned with my scope, so I definitely want to get there if I can, so I can open it as a future fast-travel destination.

It takes me a try or two to get properly oriented so that I don’t fall too far to make it to land at the archipelago. But it’s not actually hard to get there once I have my bearings. Each time I launch from the tower, it faces me the same direction, and I can’t pre-set my direction facing before I launch. The direction I want to go is backwards of the way the Skyview Tower launches me, so I have to quickly turn around and then glide. And it’s been a while, so I’m not as good at the controls and I have to get used to it.

The first try, I notice the archipelago too late and fall to grab the side of it, at a point where I can not climb up, nor can I find a flat spot to stand on so I can try to Ascend upward.

The second try, I get rammed out of the sky by an Aerocuda, and have to start over and try a third time.

The third time, I try to get directly to the sky island with the shrine, but I don’t quite make it.

The fourth time, I easily reach the near end of the archipelago, and hike it to the shrine sky island, making a few glides to get from one piece of floating rock to the next. As I get closer to the destination, I see what looks like floating viking long ships in the sky. When I get even closer to them, I discover that rather than sail rigging, they seem to have what looks like a kind of trampoline instead, which I can use to jump on and bounce off of to get a high boost into the air.

This gets me the rest of the way to the shrine. When I ender, the challenge is a series of more viking ships to bounce on, in order to gain altitude and get to the next floating platform.

I almost skip the shrine when I encounter a locked gate at the very start, but after I reconsider I realize that I can shoot an arrow through the gate and activate a trigger. It’s not very obvious, it’s just a glowing pillar of stone that doesn’t seem obviously like a door switch. But when I shoot it, the door opens, and I can retrieve the arrow, so I’m out nothing.

Getting through this shrine is really easy, the only challenge being at the end when there’s a moving skyship, which makes bouncing straight up and down a little tricky, and then a final gate, which I need to hit with another arrow, to open a door in the floor that I can then bounce up through. But it’s very easy.

I don’t notice any chests as I move through, so I probably missed something, but it’s probably not worth going back for. Unless it happens to be one of those rare permanent power-up items, like part of an outfit.

Having cleared the shrine, I want to see what else is to be found in this part of the sky, so I have a look around.

It’s hard to keep oriented, and not get turned around. The sky is dark and there are a lot of clouds, and the sky islands kind of don’t provide a lot of reference. Nevertheless I do figure out that if I keep going, I can hop a few more gaps and get to a tall structure a few islands over, and probably there’s something good over there.

I make may way over and fight a couple of Zonai construct soldiers, but they’re easy, just cannon fodder, really. I eventually get to the top of what I’m able to climb to, twice making clever use of Recall + Ascend to reach overhangs that I couldn’t Ascend to from the ground, by lifting boxes and then reversing time on them so I can ride them up high enough to where I can get up to the ceiling above me.

Unfortunately this seems to reach a point of dead end. Up above me, I see a large swirling snow cloud, which seems like it’s surrounded by a massive fleet of those “viking” long ship trampolines. If I could get up there, probably I could bounce up high enough to get into the snowstorm, but that’s almost certainly suicide with how I’m presently outfitted, even if I could make it up to the lowest of the long ships, which I can’t see how I could. There’s also Aerocudas flying around, patrolling the sky. I’m sure there’s got to be some bad monster inside the storm cloud, probably creating the bad weather that is starving out Rito Village, but I feel like I’m a long way off from being able to do anything about it.

Down and a ways off, I spot another Zonai Flux Construct, marching around on a larger sky island, and I expect that if I could make it over to there, I could probably fight it well enough to obtain another Old Map showing some part of the Underworld that I should try to visit.

And way down below, back on the ground, I spot another Shrine. It’s not far away at all, and I reason that if I could open it, I can fast travel there and use it for another starting point to explore these regions.

Over on the ground in another direction, there’s another SkyView Tower, the one for this region, which I haven’t unlocked yet. And that’s a priority, too, but I don’t know what I’ll need to do to unlock it yet, and it’s a bit further off than the Shrine, so I dive down and head to the shrine.

The shrine is near a hot springs area, but I’m full on health and don’t need healing, so I just enter. The shrine is a difficult one. There are numerous Zonai construct soldiers patrolling, some weaky armed, but most have decent arms and at least one has a shield. They’re guarding and patrolling, and I’m supposed to infiltrate, but I’m not clear how to do it.

I’m stripped of all my gear, and given a weak shield and two weak weapons to complete this mission, so I’m probably supposed to rely primarily on stealth.

I can trip the alarms and get away, and they reset after a while, so it’s not like being discovered is an automatic do-over, but there’s far too many of them for me to fight them effectively, and even if I try to pick them off and go one at a time, I’m not able to make much progress, beating one or two of the Constructs, if that. There’s one with a shield and a spiked club who is really lethal to fight against with my weak equipment.

Eventually, I work out that I could sneak around past the outermost guards, and get to an inner chamber, where there are, to my best count, at least three if not four more of them. There’s an elevated gangway above the floor, which I can Ascend to, and around the back way there’s a doorway, with some easily avoidable laser tripwires that will sound an alarm if I do hit them by accident, in which case I can just hide for a while until things calm down again. Inside this inner chamber, there are two rooms, off in opposite corners, and inside the first are a Zonai flame emitter and a beam projector. There’s a cover on the roof that I can move out of the way using Ultrahand, and then jump down and Fuse these two devices to my weapons, giving me a bit of range and a bit of extra damage dealing capacity.

It’s not very much though, and even if I Ascend up out of the room to the obscurity and safety of the roof, I still don’t know what I can manage against all these constructs at once. If I try to fight them, they quickly surround me and most of them are capable of one-shotting me, so I stand very little chance against them if I don’t have a flawless battle against them. One of them has a shock weapon, and one of them has a bow, and it’s too much for me, with my current skill level.

The second room, I don’t make it into, but the doorway is covered by tripwires, arranged so that there doesn’t seem to be a way to avoid them, and this one is a bit taller, so that I can’t get onto the roof from the gangway.

I don’t want to waste the entire evening trying to get through this gauntlet, so I give up for now and fast-travel back to the previous Shrine, high above in the skyworld. Before I travel back there, I take out some ice lizalfos, who die easily when they taste the flame emitter shield. They are elementally weak to fire and die instantly, and I get a few easy Lizalfos parts and a nice hammer weapon one of them was carrying. Once I claim them, I zip back up to the shrine I just completed on the Sky world.

I try gliding down the other way, trying to get to the Skyview Tower, but it’s a bit too far for me to reach in one flight, with all of my stamina, so I look for a safe landing as I’m close to running out. As I get closer to land, I spot another Shrine, near a gorge. There’s a few camps of monsters, from the look of it, and some camp fires, which may or may not be friendly around nearby, but right now I’m only interested in that Shrine. I land, recharge my stamina meter, and take off again, crossing over the gorge and landing right in front of the Shrine.

This Shrine is much easier than the other one I gave up on.

I merely have to avoid a few tripwires. Some are low, I have to jump over; some are high, I have to duck under. At the end, there’s a grid of them, mounted on an enclosed housing that is sliding along the walkway. But it’s obvious that I can evade them by using Ascend to pop through the roof of the beam housing, and that’s exactly what I do. It’s easy, I make it on the first try.

I only didn’t see how to get into the treasure chest chamber off to one side, but I didn’t try to look hard or think about it, either. I’m really only here to unlock the fast-travel point and to collect another Light of Blessing. I will return just to make sure the chest doesn’t have something really good in it, but it almost certainly doesn’t.

I go back into the Shrine, and discover that the item in the chest is a spicy elixir which gives 8:40 of resistance to cold, which is perhaps going to come in handy if I don’t find more warm gear to wear soon, but so far the cold has been bearable with just my cold weather pants that I got way back at the start of the game. I’m sure that will change eventually, though.

My next stop is the Skyview Tower. It’s just a short glide away from the Shrine I just completed. As I get close I observe that the base of the tower is overgrown with thorny brambles. These will do damage if I touch them, but I could fly over them, probably, or I could clear them with flame. I have plenty of bombs, fireseeds, and a flame emitter shield. I have the shield equipped, so I just use it, and it immediately breaks, but not before the brambles light up, and the fire spreads around the base of the tower, consuming everything. In just a few seconds the way is clear.

There’s no one at this tower, nothing damaged needing repair beyond the blocked entrance, so I just walk in and activate it, shoot up into the sky, and scan the terrain to update my map.

While I’m in the sky, I can see another archipelago nearby with another Shrine on it. This one is easy to reach, and I go directly there, and land right in front of the Shrine, and enter. The challenge here is a series of Zonai construct soldiers, weak ones, which have something to teach me about Fusion and Shields. I take the soldiers out quickly with my bow, which I have several that have high damage potential and rip these guys to shreds in one or two hits. The first construct happens to have a Zonai device attached to his shield, but I knock it out of his hand with a heavy weapon and take him down before he can use it against me, getting a flame emitter shield right back to replace the one I just used up to enter the Skyview Tower moments ago.

The second construct has a steel plate fused to his shield, and after defeating him I see why: flame jets blocking the way forward. I can just block them with this shield, but there’s another steel plate if I want to fuse it to one of my shields already in inventory. I don’t want to do that, though, so instead I just Ultrahand the plate and move it to block the flames in front of the door, which works just as well, and I walk though.

The final obstacle is the trickiest, and if I hadn’t failed to avoid seeing some spoiler videos showing this in use, I might have been confused for quite a while until I figured it out. A high wall, with no way to climb or fly, apparent to me, but four rockets strewn on the floor. After I defeat the soldier in here, I can get up this wall in two ways: I could go back and grab that steel plate, and mount the four rockets to it, like a platform, and ride it up, or I can Fuse a rocket onto my shield, and when I deploy the shield, it shoots me up into the sky, a bit like Revali’s Gale from BOTW.

I opt to do this method. I know that in some places it’s going to be necessary to get up higher than I can using terrain, Ascend, and even Recall tricks. So I had been wondering how I would get up to those trampoline ships in the sky, and this might just do it for me if I go back again.

Outside of the Shrine, I look around and see not too far away yet another Flux construct. Was this the same one I saw earlier, when I was in the other sky archipelago? Or is this a different one?

I think it’s time to test out that rocket shield and see what I can do now that I can zoom up into the sky.

Except… when I exit the Shrine, I don’t see where the Flux Construct is. I lost track of it when I was flying to this Shrine, and I don’t recall where I saw it. I scout around in all directions with the Scope, but I don’t spot it.

Instead I walk around on the sky island the Shrine I just cleared sits on, and look around. There are a few frozen over fountains or pools, which when stepped on, the ice cracks. After several jumps, the ice breaks away, and I fall into a shallow depression still filled with a little bit of water, and find a treasure chest or two.

Nearby is another Zonai device dispenser, so I give it 5 small charges and see what it gives me — I get a few time bombs, some rockets, some flame emitters, a balloon.

There’s another one of those rotating catapult contraptions near by that I use to launch myself over to the last island in the archipelago, where I find a treasure chest containing an Old Map, which tells me the the location of a treasure I already found, which I expect must be that bright mining garment I found in the underworld that one time.

Looking around again, I spot another Shrine, far below on the ground, at the western edge of Hebra. I jump off the edge and glide down to it, making it without having to land and walk at all.

This Shrine’s challenge is a series of time-reversal puzzles, which are fairly easy and don’t give me any real trouble. I just roll some balls uphill and get them to go where I need them to. I do learn from this that the range of Recall is considerably longer than the range of Ultrahand — a fact which I’m sure will come in handy at some point. I still probably underutilize Recall, and could stand to find more creative ways of employing it.

So I’ve managed to cover a good bit of Hebra, unlocked the map for this zone, and cleared several Shrines, but I still haven’t made it to Rito village, and I’m not quite sure where it was located. As I’ve explored so much of this zone already, it doesn’t seem like I’ve needed any special cold resistance items beyond the pants I found early on in the game. I’m a little surprised by that, I thought for sure I would need more extreme cold gear to survive for long in this area, and so far that hasn’t been the case at all, not even high up in the sky where you would think things would be even more frigid, and not even when I’ve gotten dunked in some freezing water.

It turns out I’m actually not far at all from Rito village. I check the map, and it is easy to see the village from there. It’s an obvious round feature on the map, a nearly circular lake with a series of islands in the center, which in person are very tall pillars of rock. And it’s not far from the Shrine I just cleared, either. Just a couple of quick glides downhill, in fact.

I glide down, and I can see a Shrine inside the Rito Village, and if I can get over to it, I should be able to activate it as a travel point. But as I’m gliding out, I look down and spot what looks like a friendly, inhabited cabin, and some bonfires. I decide to stop here first and talk to the people and find out what they can tell me. It’s basically just the same information I have heard before, about Rito village being in a state of famine due to the extreme cold. They do have a book which talks about some legend of a god who came down from the sky, and the Rito tried to help him get back up to where he belongs, but needed to use materials to build something because even they could not fly high enough. The materials were used to build air ships, which from the description match what I’ve seen already from being up among the clouds. The legend mentions the storm cloud, too, but I’m not all that sure what to make of it. I’m sure I’ll figure it all out eventually.

After I take a few items that are offered to me, I head out, intending to try to glide the rest of the way to Rito Village. However, since I descended to check out this cabin, I don’t have enough altitude from where I am currently to make it, and it looks like I should just walk around the edge of the lakeside cliffs to where the old bridge is. I remember this from BOTW.

As I come around the lakeside cliffs perimeter, I come across a small bokoblin camp, with 3 or 4 bokos. They don’t look too tough, and they’re all sitting around a blazing fire trying to keep warm and cook some meat. I hit the blue one with a bomb arrow, headshotting him and taking him out entirely. Another boko dies, caught in the blast, leaving just two behind. Incredibly, they don’t even seem to know that they are under attack. They just seem puzzled, look around and don’t see me, and quickly forget about it and go back to standing around the fire. Idiots! I finish them both off with a couple more normal arrows, and loot the camp. They have a treasure chest, which contains a weapon that doesn’t seem very interesting, weaker than most of what I have already, so I just leave it.

The next stop is the old Rito Stables, only now it’s the Lucky Clover Gazette, a newspaper that has started up since the Stables had to close due to the extreme cold. I talk to everyone there. First I learn that the bridge to Rito Village is out, and there’s no way across currently. Oh they haven’t seen what I can do, have they. I bet I can get across in any of several ways, if I want to. And I do want to.

One of them tells me about pine cones being extremely oily and flammable, and how they can create updrafts. I’ve learned this already. He also tells me he used to own the stable, and decided to stay on to help out when they got bought out by the newspaper.

Then I talk to a Rito who recalls talking to me a while ago. He’s the pelican looking fellow, I barely remember him, as in real time it was several months ago, but he was the one who said I should meet him in Rito Village. And now here I am. He recruits me to work for the Lucky Clover, and introduces me to the boss, a Hylian woman named Traysi. She offers me payment in the form of a Froggy Armor suit, which has the special property of enabling me to cling to surfaces without falling. I guess this will be extremely handy in wet conditions, and perhaps may even enable me to climb ceilings. I hope.

Well, cool, I’m in.

They want me to take an assignment of going around to the various stables looking for information about Princess Zelda sightings. She’s been spotted all over, apparently, and they want the scoop.

So I guess if I would have come out this way first, like they suggested I do back at the beginning of the game when I first met people at the stable near Lookout Landing, I could have picked up those stories when I went around and found all the other stables. But now I have to backtrack. But that’s not a big deal since I can fast travel to all of them pretty quickly.

I really hope this advances some part of the side quests to get the fairy flowers unlocked — to get that traveling musical group to re-form, so they’ll play music to bring back the Fairies. Then I can get up-armored and start kicking some ass.

I am pretty nearby the Eldin SkyView Tower, so I might as well run out to it and see if I can activate it to unlock the map here before I head West to visit Rito Village.

It turns out not to be very difficult at all. The tower is out of commission. An Aerocuda has flown off with the control terminal, and is flying around in lazy circles with it in its claws. The repairman, Sawson, is there to tell me about it. It’s a simple matter of shooting the Aerocuda out of the sky. I climb up the tower to the limit of my endurance meter, and then jump off, glide, use bullet time, and it’s like the easiest shot in the world. Aerocudas are one-shot enemies, and the stolen terminal drops to the ground. I pick it up and take it over to Sawson, who asks me to put it near to where it installs, and he hooks it back up again. The tower is operational once more.

I shoot up into the sky to scan in the map data, and as I’m coming down I spot a sky island very nearby, and glide over to it to check it out. As I get closer, I discover a Flux Construct II walking about on a sandy arena-like field strewn with Zonai objects.

I engage it in battle, using Ultrahand to rip it apart, and drop the blocks. Eventually the whole thing is disrupted enough to fall apart, and I am able to hit the one vulnerable block with a bomb arrow. A few hits, and it drops a treasure chest it was carrying on its back. I run to the chest and open it, and find another Old Map with an X marked on a spot nearby to the northeast, right where there’s a great chasm to the underworld. I’m curious as to what the Map mark means, but I’m prioritizing my visit to Rito Village, so it will have to wait.

After it drops the chest, the Flux Construct II changes up its attack modes. It turns into a giant Rubik’s Cube of Death, which rolls at me. This form I can deal with, again by ripping out blocks and letting it fall apart and hitting the vulnerable part again. But the next mode is something I don’t feel equipped for: a carpet bombing checkerboard of death. It goes into the sky high above me, laying itself out in a big grid, and sending row after row of blocks at me, which hover above my head before tumbling down to the ground to do huge damage if they touch me. And I can’t see the vulnerable block among them, so I’m like what the hell. I bet maybe the thing to do is use Recall on a block and ride it up to the sky and hit the leader block from up there, but I have no idea if that’s really the solution or not. I don’t want to figure it out, I’m on a quest to unlock fairy flowers and upgrade my damn armor so I can last more than a hit in a real fight.

I run off the edge of the sky island and plummet earthward. Below me I see a shrine, so I glide to it and enter. The test is a sneak strike trainer. There’s a zonai construct in the middle of a small, semi-enclosed area. I need to sneak up behind it and get close, and then deliver a sneakstrike. This is not actually too difficult, but I do have to re-learn that in order to sneakstrike, you need to be close enough for the on-screen tip to tell you that you’re in range to do a sneakstrike. So this actually takes a bunch of tries, but eventually I figure it out.

After I leave the shrine, I run across a field, where I see on the far end, and off into the shallow waters of the eastern Eldin shore’s spiral jetty, there is another shrine. Between my location and this new shrine, there’s the chasm to the underworld that is right by where the X on the Old Map is.

I don’t dive down to check it out, but since I’ve unlocked this shrine right here, I can fast travel back any time I want to. A bokoblin skeleton comes out of the night to shoot arrows at me, and I harvest a few before running down to the spiral jetty area.

I don’t want to mess around walking the long way along the entire spiral. I have a lot of stamina, and this enables me to plow straight through, swimming the gaps and make a beeline straight to the shrine.

This shrine is called Turbo-something. There’s an electrical motor in the center of the room, disconnected from a power supply. There’s a metal plate that I can use to connect the circuit to power the motor, and a fan blade that I can attach to the motor hub using Ultrahand. This creates a massive updraft, which I can use with my glider to get into the air, where I see two corners of the room have platforms high above that I can now glide to. One has a treasure chest with a really buff Zonai Shield with a 50 rating, the other platform has 3 Zonai flame projectors. I can mount the flame projectors to the fan blades, and when the fan spins them around, they ignite these torches that are mounted on pillars surrounding the motor mount. If I just manually light each torch, they get extinguished by a water sprinkler system that activates, but if attached to the fan blade, they spin quickly enough to ignite all the torches, six in total, which is the trigger to unlock the door to the inner shrine.

So I’ve cleared two more shrines. Now it’s time to transport as far west as I can and see if I can find the way to Rito Village.

I decide to hike up the road from Lookout Landing to Eldin. It’s the quickest way to go into any new territory. If I take a horse, I can go faster, but I spend more time mounting and dismounting every five seconds while I am finding tons of interesting stuff to investigate and forage to pick up. I don’t have any quick-travel destinations that are much closer, and if I glide out there from somewhere, I just fly over a lot of interesting stuff, or I abort and dive the moment I come over something that looks interesting.

Running up the road, I don’t encounter a lot of enemies. In fat, I don’t have any combat encounters at all. I do spot a bokoblin or moblin here or there, but they’re well off the road and don’t seem to pay me any mind, and so I leave them alone.

As I get closer to the border of the Central Hyrule zone that I have mapped out, I’m coming to a bridge. On the far side, I see a huge, moss covered Battle Talus, with a couple of Bokoblins riding on it. I might have to engage it to get beyond and to the marker on the map where I have spotted a Skyview Tower, which is my destination. But just before I get to the bridge, I find a Korok who needs help finding his friend, and I decide to give him a hand. There’s a convenient Zonai wing on the ground, and I attach a rocket and a fan to it, and then glue the korok to the vehicle and ride it in the direction of the friend, who is on the other side of the river. We make it and I’m on the other side of the river without having to deal with the Battle Talus. Plus I get two more Korok seeds.

As a bonus if that wasn’t enough I spot the Eldin Stables right nearby, up a slight ridge and along a road. So I go there, and I talk to people. I get Pony Points, and I find two people standing on the stage. I think they’re the ones from the musical group. One of them has a violin, and her name is basically a weird spelling of Violynne (or something like that) and the other is called Mastro, and seems to be a conductor. Talking to them doesn’t really do much, they are talking about something bad that has happened, and they want to report it to the newspaper.

I’m not sure what to do about that, but I guess I’ve been hearing about the newspaper out in Rito Village, and how it’s possible to get a job as a reporter working for them. So I guess, I could go to Rito, get a job as a reporter, go to Eldin, and report these guys’ story, and maybe that will lead to the band getting back together and playing music for the Fairies and unlock all their flowers. It seems like a lot to do, but I guess that’s what I’m going to do next.

There is a Fairy flower near the Eldin Stables, which I need to mark on the map, and the usual Shrine and another Well behind the Stable. I explore the Well, it’s small. After I Ascend out of the well, I spot the Balloon that belongs to Kilton the monster guy. It’s night and I assume the rules are the same in TOTK as in BOTW, that he randomly appears sometimes in certain places, and only at night, so without delay I run out to talk to him. He is there, and he has a brother. The brother, Kolton, wants to become a Satori — the mythical blue animal we’ve known as the Lord of the Forest, or the blue bunnies, I’m not sure which. He believes this can be accomplished by eating bubbul frog gems, and I have 9 of them so I give him one, and he feels funny, thanks me, and then runs off before I can give him the rest of them, telling me that he’s going to look for more, and if I have more I should give them to him. Well, doofus, why don’t you take the 9 others I have? As a reward, he gave me a bokoblin mask, and I wouldn’t have minded getting the rest of his stuff right then and there. Oh well.

Kolton had been exploring a nearby cave, and said that there was a bubbul frog within, so I go down and explore it, clear it out, and then come back up and tackle the shrine.

The Shrine is a series of easy Recall puzzles that takes me no time to figure out and solve.

Once I exit the Shrine, I can see a campfire smoke drifting up from a way down the road, to the West. That’s the direction Rito Village is in anyway. I figure I’ll go check out the campfire and see what I can do there, and then come back to try to visit and unlock the SkyView Tower for Eldin, and then head to Rito Village.

On the way to the campfire I find another well, and clear it out. It’s got a bubbling mud pool instead of water, and I have to build a bridge to cross it to pick up a whole bunch of brightbloom seeds.

The campfire belongs to two treasure seekers who are trying to get a treasure chest sitting out in the middle of a muddy pool that they can’t cross. I build a bridge out of boards and retrieve it. Beyond the muddy bog, there’s another cave, and I go into it and check it out, clearing it out and finding another bubbul frog. I Ascend out of the cavern, and then glide down the hill to land on the road back where I started from, and run along the road away to a bridge, heading back to Hyrule Castle’s north side, where I spotted another Shrine.

This shrine has some more puzzles that are solved by Recall, and they’re a little harder than the shrine by Eldin Stables, but not that much harder.

After I come out, I’m ready to go try to get to the Eldin Skyview Tower. I fast-travel back to the shrine near Eldin Stables. I notice that there’s a broken down wagon with two wheels missing on it, sitting in front of the stage. I figure I’m supposed to fix it, like I did the wagon at another village, and there’s some wheels nearby, so I attach one, but the Mastro asks me not to do anything strange with their Breezer, which I guess is the name they gave to their wagon. OK dude.

Some other people I have talked to have warned me about Gorons carrying strange rocks, and another lady who is walking along the road talks to me about a fashionable bandit who hid outfits, and points out some locations on my map where they might be found. She also tells me that the Fairies are in hiding, but if they can be coaxed out again they will augment your clothes, making them more protective than armor.

Well don’t I know all that, but I’d like to know how. I guess I’ve been getting some clues. Once I see if I can activate the Skyview Tower here, I’m heading to find Rito Village and join the newspaper and see if I can’t get some fancy clothes from the Fairies.

When I get to the SkyView Tower, I find that it has been damaged by a falling piece of sky island, which has knocked the lid off and jammed the door shut. There’s a man from Hudson Construction Company who is there to service the tower, but he can’t get inside because of the damage.

It doesn’t really look all that damaged to me, although the lid of the tower is knocked off. I decide that’s a clue that I might be able to get in from the top, so I climb the tower, and find that my hunch is correct. I jump down and the controls are working, I just need to activate them. The tower turns on, the doors open, and I’ve resolved the problem.

I take the “elevator” up into the sky, and look around, updating the map as I do so. Very nearby there is a sky island that I can easily land on as I’m coming down, over to the east. I drift toward it and land on it, and it seems to be part of a chain of sky islands that are connected together by rails. There’s a system of Zonai carts that I can ride up the rails to ascend higher into the sky and reach the next island.

There are a few Zonai constructs here, all hostile, and I have to destroy them as I explore. In addition to the usual forage, I find a chest with a nice bow in it, a Zonai gumball machine, and a shrine.

I enter the shrine and clear it, the challenge is a firey one, with lava and Zonai water sprinklers. Spraying the lava with water cools it down, creating a crust that floats and is buoyant and cool enough to walk on. These serve as stepping stones, or can be joined together with Ultrahand to create bridges, ramps, or whatever you need. You can even carry a sprinkler, walk forward, and create a path as you go forward.

I clear the Shrine and look around for a bit to survey the land. There’s one last bit of sky island here to check out, and all it has on it is an apple tree. But it seems like it must be special, because it’s so hard to reach. I try to glide over to it, but I can’t climb up the side to reach a level part that I can stand on, and end up falling down. Rather than fast-travel back to the shrine on the sky level and try again, I notice a falling star coming down, and it’s hard to gauge how far away it is, but I think it’s nearby, but deep into the mountains of Eldin, and I decide to try to retrieve it. I glide a very long way, probably closing about half of the distance, but then run out of stamina, and fall nearly to my death. I save myself at the last second with the last chance glider move, but I deploy it a bit too early, and lose almost all of my health when I drop the rest of the way. Worse, I land on a steep slope and slide all the way down it, fortunately not taking more damage, and more fortunately than that ending up in a healing hot spring. I sit in it until I’m back to full health, trying to spot the star fragment’s shine, but the mountains around me are much too tall, and I’ve lost track of what direction it was in, and lose it.

I try climbing to re-acquire the marker, but it’s in vain. I do make it to the top of the mountain, much to my surprise it is not too hot and I take no damage. I spot a few shrines visible within a long glide’s distance, and note that one of them is by a stable, so I head toward that one.

This shrine is a real challenge for me, because I suck so much at combat. I’m stripped of all my gear and clothing, so all I have are my glider and the Zonai arm powers. I have to defeat a bunch of Zonai constructs, who are armed with weak weapons but any of them are enough to kill me in two hits, and they have significant reach advantage on me. There’s a wooden club, and two tank-like robotic Zonai vehicles. They’re really more like Roombas than tanks, but they can mount Zonai devices and thereby be turned into fighting vehicles, and turned on by striking them with a weapon.

There’s two of them in the first room, and two spikey metal plates, which I mount to the front, and then activate them, so they take out the first Zonai construct. After defeating the Zonai construct, a locked gate opens, and the real challenge is presented: a larger room, with 6 or 7 Zonai constructs, armed with all manner of weapons, most of them spear-like with reach advantage. These guys are fast, and I have to keep moving at all times just to stay out of their reach. Running around the room activates all of them and they rush me, and if I stop moving even for a second I get hit by one of them, and I can’t afford to get hit at all. But as I’m running around, I notice a few more of the Zonai roombas, and some weapons that I could potentially attach to them, if I could manage to get a moment of breathing room and was really on top of my Ultrahand control.

It’s not happening though. I try again and again, and I just keep getting slaughtered. I try a new approach, and just send the roombas in, hoping that they will distract the Constructs enough that they will not notice me run into the room.

I try pushing the roombas into the battle arena room with Ultrahand, and hang back and let them soften up the enemies as much as possible, but what keeps happening is the roombas will run up a ramp and fight the lead Construct, and push it to the edge, and then one of them will fall over the edge and flip upside down and become stuck.

One time, though, I finally get lucky. The little roombas manage to not fall off a platform, and all the Zonai constructs try to get at them, and they’re getting in each others way more than they are doing anything. I can’t see whether the roombas have life meters or not; I assume they can’t take infinite damage, but they aren’t going down. Maybe the spiked plates are working like armor, protecting them against damage, or maybe the Zonai constructs weapons just aren’t that strong. Whatever the case, the roombas seem to be winning. Eventually, they take down all the Zonai constructs except one, which is on a higher platform and armed with a bow. I run up at this point and activate one of the additional roombas sitting in the big room, attaching a flame projector to it, and using Ultrahand, move it up to the platform to attack the last one, and it takes it down pretty quickly, thankfully.

The challenge vanquished, I feel like I didn’t really do anything other than set up some machines and let them do almost everything. I wasn’t a capable, contributing fighter in the mix; I just sat back and let them take care of everything.

It kind of feels like maybe that was the lesson, but I also feel like if I had better ability with the controls, maybe I could have run in and activated each of the additional roombas and had a huge melee going on with them, and it would have been a lot less cowering in the back room waiting and watching from a distance, and more something that felt actually fun.

Oh well, I did it, and there’s no wrong way to do anything in this game, right?

The reward for this shrine is a really nice Zonai Captain III Spear, which is extra durable and has a high damage rating according to the description.

Anyway, I head out from the Shrine, and visit the nearby Stable, which is for South Akkala. I talk to everyone; the main thing going on here seems to be a missing chicken that I find has fallen down the well. I can’t figure out how to get the chicken out of the well. It isn’t grabbable with the Ultrahand ability, and I can’t find anything small enough that is ultrahandable that I can fit down the well to maybe build into a chicken bucket and lift the poor thing out. So I dunno what the solution is.

I talk to the chicken’s caretaker, and she says that she just wishes the chicken had some company, so I throw another chicken down there, and this does seem to make the chicken happy. It lays an egg, and so maybe I’m done? But I don’t feel like I am. I feel like I need to rescue the chicken.

The people at the Stables usually tell you about what’s going on in the area, as well as what’s nearby down the road. It’s no different here. But I’m not really that interested in hearing it right now, because I really wanted to go to Rito Village, and ended up clear on the other side of the world because of the way the SkyView Tower in Eldin lead me this way. It’s OK though. I can fast travel about 3/4th of the way to Rito from anywhere, and nothing I do in the world is really that much of a waste of time. It might not be the most important thing there is that I could be doing, but I’m always either finding koroks, clearing shrines, unlocking the map, doing some minor side quest or discovering some new part of the world.

I feel like I’m missing something.

So far in my travels, I’ve discovered two Fairy Flowers, but have been unable to open either of them. There have been clues about the troupe of musicians who hang out near the stables. They’ve apparently traveled to Eldin, which is in the northeast part of Hyrule, and an area I haven’t been to yet.

If I ever want to be capable of going toe-to-toe with monsters, I need to either power up my armor, or learn the secret to dodging. Mostly when I try to fight monsters, I find that my dodge ability stinks. I can’t gauge whether I’m close enough to an enemy to need to dodge. If I’m focused on one enemy, I get flanked by another and hit by that one instead of the one I’m facing off with taking a swing at. Either way, I get one shotted by just about everything in the game now, and it really sucks.

So I think while I’m going to have to master the perfect dodging to enable flurry rushes, I’m going to have to get hit a lot in the process, so probably the best thing for that is to power up my armor, by unlocking the Fairy Flowers, so that means traveling back out to the Stables and looking for more clues about how to find the traveling musicians.

I helped the boy with the flute a while back, and he said he was going to try to meet up with the rest of the group and re-join the band in Eldin, so I guess that’s where I need to go. But just to be sure, I decide to take a quick tour of the known stables I’ve found so far, and double check to make sure I remember all the clues so far.

On the way there, I’m distracted by another Shooting Star, which falls near Hyrule Castle Gates, and I run out that way to grab the Star Fragment. Since I’m there, I decide to try checking out the Castle. I find that the side entrance that had been guarded and off-limits is now open, so I walk in and look around. I find a lot of boxes, and breaking them yields a LOT of arrows. Pretty quickly, I’m stocked up to 45 arrows! I keep exploring the twisty maze-like passages of the Castle, and end up discovering a trap door in the floor, which I take down, and then this leads me to a spiral staircase, which I take up until I get to a hallway. Inside the hallway, I encounter a tough Bokoblin and Lizalfos, which I am not well enough equipped to fight, so I ditch this exploratory mission and fast-travel back to Lookout Landing, where I pray at the statue to get another Stamina expansion, rest at the free bed to regain my health, and talk to some of the people there. It’s a mostly successful mission, since I filled up with a bunch of arrows, I’m happy about it, but it doesn’t seem like I’m yet ready to take on this area of the world.

I quick travel back down to the South, to the shrine nearest Highland Stables, and talk to everyone there. They reinforce the “travel to Eldin” message, so I guess that’s where I should head to.

Outside of the stable, I find a broken Zonai vehicle made from four wheels and a stone slab. It’s rugged looking and can handle all terrain, it reminds me of the one I built when I was in the underground one time. I decide to try repairing it, I put the wheel back on, and then I find a control yoke, and I have a nice, steerable ATV. I decide to test it out and try to get a better understanding of how the battery system works.

I have yet to expand my battery capacity even once, and I’m starting to think I missed something or forgot/didn’t read some instructions on how to improve my battery pack’s capacity. I would like to have a few expansions so that the Zonai tech will be more useful and therefore more valuable. In the meantime, I need to figure out how this stuff works better. It surprised me when, even after turning off the power to the floating sky block vehicle that I made when I was trying to reach the floating labyrinth up North that the platform broke anyway after a while. I need to find out how that works, and on the ground with a wheeled vehicle seems really safe. I drive it, run the battery pack down, and disable it and hop off, and let my battery recharge, and this seems to allow me to travel indefinitely with the vehicle. nothing gets used up or breaks.

OK, so will that work with sky vehicles, or what? I guess we’ll find out next time I try them.

Driving around, I run into a Korok who needs to find his friend, and his friend is nearby but on the other side of the river. I don’t want to give up the motor cart, so I glue the Korok to it, and try to drive around to find a place where I can cross the river. I think maybe the vehicle will propel itself through water, anyway, so maybe it will just enable me to cross the river.

I drive around a mountain road, and keep having to stop to let the battery charge, but it’s OK because I keep running into patches of forage or running over game animals and harvest their meat. So this is really productive. I only try to avoid encounters with enemies, and learn that jumping off the vehicle without turning it off will continue to use battery, and the vehicle will run out of control. So I need to turn it off, then jump off. But sometimes jumping off and letting it ram an enemy might be just the thing.

I finally get down to where I can see the Korok’s buddy camped on the other side of the river. I try driving into the river, but the vehicle doesn’t work well. It floats, but can’t seem to move forward under power. I’m at the mercy of the current, which fortunately is slow. I decide to detach the Korok I’ve glued to the body of the vehicle, and extend him toward the opposite shore as close as I can using Ultrahand, then swim to shore, and hope I can grab him. This works, but just barely, he’s at the extreme range of Ultrahand when I wade out to just before it gets deep enough that I have to start swimming. But I grab him and take his soggy ass over to his friend, and they give me the customary reward. I’m now up to like 66 Korok seeds, and still have yet to run into Hestu.

I notice a well right by this Korok’s campsite, and decide to check it out. It seems to be filled with Gloom, and I wonder if I can go down it or not. It turns out to be a secret Discovery! –a hole leading to the underworld.

I am super low on bomb flowers, and those are pretty plentiful underground, and I’d been planning on doing a foraging session to stock up on them, so I decide this is a good opportunity to take some time to explore and see if I can find some good stuff.

I spend a long time underground, and I’m pretty well off. I have almost 200 brightbloom seeds, so I’m in no danger of getting lost in the dark. I can use them to light my way. I’m near the edge of the region that I had explored and lit up the Light Roots, but it’s mostly new territory that I haven’t been through before.

I mostly find a lot of Poes, Deep Fireflies, and plants other than the Bomb Flowers I really want. I also find a lot of Zonaite ore deposits.

I have to fight a few times, but mostly am happy to ignore enemies and sneak around them or run away. I end up discovering a chest in the Daphne Mine region which contains a Mining Suit of clothing which has a glow effect on it, which will keep me from being completely in the dark. I find though that it doesn’t do that much to light the way ahead of me, so I keep throwing brightbloom seeds, and switch back to my dark shirt after a while, on the theory that it’s better not to be lit up and highly visible when I’m trying to sneak and avoid monsters.

Due to the ever-present obstacles of cavern walls and Gloom pits, and the extreme dark, it’s really easy to get turned around underground, and it takes a long time to figure out a way forward and keep moving in the direction I want to go in. I spend a lot of time hugging the wall of the cavernous underworld, or a large expanse of Gloom, looking for a way to proceed in the direction I want to go.

I discover that there is more verticality to the underworld than I had appreciated initially. There are large fungus-like trees that are easy to climb, and have large, broad leaves that I can stand on and get a better look at the landscape. And there are some massive tree roots that are easy to climb, gentle curving slopes that wind around and allow me to get high enough to glide a long way. Getting a good glider launch position can really help save time, by getting me over an expanse of Gloom that I otherwise would have had to walk a long time to get around.

I eventually find another mining area, and then a Stalnox patrolling a field. I avoid that encounter until it becomes clear that I need to cross that field to get into a new unexplored territory, and I see a bunch of Poes in that direction. So I arm myself with my best weapons and engage.

I nock an arrow with a Red Keese eyeball, and try to target the eye of Stalnox. Keese eyeballs fused to arrows give them a homing ability, but it doesn’t seem to know to home especially on the eyeball, and so doesn’t really help. The first time I fire, I do manage to hit the eyeball, stunning the Stalnox, and I run up and hit it while it’s stunned with a weapon made of two Bokoblin Arms, which has a damage rating of 48, which is by far my most powerful weapon, but it’s also my least durable, and breaks after just a few hits. It seems weird that the damage bonus for bokoblin skeleton arms is so high, but it’s a quirk that I’m happy to take advantage of while it lasts, which is never very long.

Fortunately, though, these hits really deal a lot of damage. The Stalnox gets up and runs after me, and I am trying to evade it, while the camera wans to look back at it and not in the direction I’m running in, which is terrible when you’re trying to avoid stepping in a puddle of Gloom. But I’m extremely lucky and manage to not step in any Gloom. I waste a bunch of arrows trying to hit the Stalnox in the eye again, the Keese eyeball doing nothing to guarantee a hit on the eye. But eventually, after 6 or 7 more arrows, I manage to connect again and stun the creature. This time the hit knocks the eyeball out of its head, which is when you have the chance to finish it off. Unfortunately the eye rolls down hill a long way, and every time I hit it, it rolls further, toward Gloom and terrain I don’t want to get stuck in while there’s a Stalnox chasing me. Just as it gets to the edge of the Gloom, I manage to deal the final blow, and kill the Stalnox.

It’s a successful fight, I pick up a lot of loot drops, mostly Stalnox parts but also some weapons, and I need to replenish the empty weapon slots from weapons I broke.

Past the Stalnox field, I come to a new Light Root, one I haven’t activated yet. I hurry in that direction, climbing a steep ridge with several switchbacks, and eventually make it to the Light Root, and activate it, illuminating another section of the underground world map.

I still haven’t found very many bombs, and just have 7 now. So I try to continue exploring and foraging. I end up taking a long time in the depths, losing track of time, and exploring a lot. Mostly undisturbed, and I’m able to sneak around, avoiding enemies and running from them when I need to in the more open areas where I can use my extended stamina to outrun them. I do kill lots of stalfos, which is fine because they’re easy to kill, drop decent weapons, plus lots of Zonaite.

When the situation isn’t one I want to deal with, I just fast-travel out of the engagement back to the nearest Light Root, and start over. It’s almost unfair. But the game gives you this ability, which I feel makes the game difficulty “casual” at best until you decide to take on the more difficult challenges.

The monsters I least like to encounter are the the small, squat, lizard-looking creatures that come in groups of 3 or more. They’re fast, they leap at me, and they are good at staying out of the reach of my weapons. I learn to deal with them by fusing two spears together, creating a pike that has super long reach.

At one point I come to a dense grove of trees. Many of these are Dark Evermeans, the trees that come to life and try to kill you. There’s too many of them to waste all of my Fire Seeds and Red Chuchu jelly on, so I just outrun them. The great thing about Evermeans is that they’re so slow, so it’s easy to get away from them.

I don’t recall where, exactly, sometime before the Stalnox fight, but at one point as I’m climbing up a ridge, I find a large square ruin, what looks like it might have been a foundation of a Zonai building. There’s a Flux Construct here, scanning the darkness with a revolving 360 degree laser scan. I don’t get a good look at it, because it’s almost entirely black. Many sessions ago, I tried to do battle with a Flux Construct in the air world, the construct composed of many metal blocks, and it was too much for me, and I’m not looking for a challenge here, so I give this one a wide berth, and manage to avoid its detection, and move on.

At one point I run into a trio of bokoblin stalfos riding on skeleton horses, and I use the skeleton horse to travel over the Gloom, which allows me to take a more direct path without losing hearts to Gloom sickness.

By the end of the excursion, I end up collecting nearly 40 bombs, but using up more arrows, leaving me with just 28 left. But I discover 2-3 more Light Roots and open up more of the map around Central Hyrule. Including an area that looks like it must be directly underneath Castle Hyrule. There’s a section that looks like it should be accessible from where I’m at, that will lead straight into the Castle from below, but I can’t find the entrance to it. The map shows some structures that look unnatural, that is man (or Zonai?) made and not a geological cave, but no matter what I try, I don’t find a way to it. There is a sheer cliff that extends up to the ceiling where the entrance way should be.

Eventually I decide I’ve had enough exploring the underworld. I’ve tossed over 60 brightbloom bulbs, but I’ve explored a lot of territory and gained a few important things.

I fast travel back to Lookout Landing to rest and consider my journey to Eldin.

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.