Today is May 12th, 2024. One year has passed since the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for the Nintendo Switch. And I'm still here playing this game, trying to achieve a mostly-blind 100%, but at least I've gotten very close to this goal. By now I have become a master chef in Hyrule, with a well-fed Malanya as my reference, and I'm only one Korok short of the 100% on my map.
Secret Side Quest
While I had completed all side quests listed in the compendium a while ago, it doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't any people left in Hyrule who still may want something. At least, I've found one more person: Calyban in Gerudo Town, who was still busy throwing her bottled messages into the sewers.
Originally, I assumed that this was just to show you the way into the shelter when you first arrive at Gerudo Town. But she keeps doing this, even after the Sand Shroud has disappeared and everyone else returned to the surface. This has me wondering if you're supposed to do something here after all...
And there is this intricate section down there, which connects to the waterfall next to the Sand Seal rental shop, where you have an elevated crack in the wall. If I remember correctly, you even had to dig your way there... for seemingly no reward. And since there was so much to process at the time, I didn't really give it more thought before now.
Well, you can use the crack to lift up the bottle from below. Then you need to get above and use Recall on the bottle to grab it from the surface. That's one complicated puzzle for something that doesn't even get you a registered side quest. Maybe there's an easier way to get the bottle aboveground, but this is how I did.
Then I thought I had to give the bottle to Bozai, who coincidentally was right up there, on top of the secret club, but he doesn't react to it at all, other than the usual Ultrahand-induced panic. This would have been his chance to finally score with the Gerudo, but it's his loss...
Anyway, you can just become Calyban's chosen voe yourself and get a Hearty Cream Soup as a reward, as a token of her love. Since I was still in the middle of collecting recipes, this was the best possible outcome... This seems to be a special recipe, even, similar to the Noble Pursuit, where I don't think you will be able to obtain it from Kiana. And that out of all the Gerudo they would pick the polluter as a love interest for Link, that's rich.
Gourmet Guesser
As for filling out the rest of the recipe book, I'm now down to four missing meals. I've made such good progress, because I was able to identify a big chunk of the recipes myself after all, so I didn't have to solely rely on Kiana.
There was the Fruitcake, for example, which is something that you learn in Breath of the Wild for a side quest, but I forgot and this had me confused for a while. It's right between the Nutcake and the Cheesecake, where I thought that those use the same base ingredients as the different pies: wheat, sugar and butter. But you don't actually need the butter in some cases... Anyway, you can also make Fruit Pies and Apple Pies, but the Fruitcake – where you have to combine apples or wildberries with some other fruit – eluded me in this list, until I finally remembered it from Breath of the Wild.
Then there were all the different copious meals, which is usually a lot of the same, e.g. five mushrooms for a Copious Mushroom Skewer. But you can't just use the cheapest ingredients, especially with the meat. I'm not even sure you can learn them from Kiana, because she might be too stingy.
Speaking of meat, in some cases you also have three different variants with the prime and gourmet meats, where you may be able to fill the gaps accordingly. It's the same for poultry. In one case I essentially good three new meals at once from Kiana, when she presented me with a Gourmet Poultry Pilaf, from which I could derive the Poultry Pilaf and Prime Poultry Pilaf.
The one thing I wanted the most was the base recipe for the omelet, however, where eventually she proffered me a Mushroom Omelet, which was the key to unlocking the Vegetable Omelets, finally. Now, hindsight bias is questioning me how I wasn't able to find those out on my own, because the base recipe is simply egg, butter, and salt. It's essentially what I would use to make an omelet in real life... Not that the other recipes are equally realistic.
Malanya Munch
Finally, I could get rid of those three apple pies that I've kept in my inventory since October. Those are required for the final speed buff and I had made them before I realized that I didn't know how to make Vegetable Omelets. How hard could it be, right...? I didn't want to eat or sell the pies, because they don't spoil anyway and it was only a matter of time until I find out how to properly make all types of omelets. Oh well... but Malanya sure was enjoying those six month old pies.
With all the culinary knowledge that I've acquired since then, it was easy enough to boost that golden horse into what it should have been from the get-go: a perfect five-star being. Well, it could be slightly more convenient. There is a cooking pot nearby Malanya's spring and it even has a roof, so that's great, but it's still a bit of a walk...
So, I wanted my golden horse to speed things up, but it usually refuses to go on the first wooden bridge that leads to Malanya when it's too fast. One time it even ended up in the pond, unable to get out, so I had to resist my urge to build a hoverbike and instead go back to the East Akkala Stable to save it from its misery. Wouldn't have happened with the Ancient Saddle, I'm just saying.
And even with all those quintuple stars to its name, I doubt that I will use Hypona that much going forward, because horses are no match for the convenience that is Autobuild in this game. I've took it for a ride all over Hyrule Field and it was fun to experience a horse will speed and stamina, but the hoverbike is still faster and doesn't have the same limitations as a horse.
For example, I was thinking of extending my ride towards Faron, but then I would have needed to cross the Great Bridge of Hylia, where you have to get past by a Flame Gleeok without your horse getting charred. Not a great plan.
With that in mind, I doubt that I will bother with upgrading any other of the horses. I might do it for the royal white horse, because it's the only other special horse that can be enhanced. But it's not worth the effort (which includes getting enough ingredients, because Malanya always wants three of everything) for any of the normal horses. And I do like the idea that the golden horse is this special horse with the best possible stats.
Cargo Carriage
You may even want to keep some horses with different stats around anyway, because faster and stronger isn't always better... Well, it isn't in case of the box transport mini-game at the Highland Stable, where I gave it another try with my golden god horse... Which didn't work out.
However, since Blynne keeps telling that this game isn't about speed, I gave it another try with the slowest horse that I still had: Spot. I've only enhanced its pull stat once, so it was mostly three stars. But this did the trick and I was able to solve this parcours for the first time... And score three Pony Points as a reward, greaaaaat! Well, you're told what you will get here in advance and I'm fully okay with mini-games being optional, especially when they are annoying as this one, because then you can just ignore them. At least I have now managed to beat every mini-game in the game, so that's something.
The Last of the Koroks, Part II
While waiting for Kiana to come up with another meal, I was mainly busy searching for the missing Koroks. And with "searching" I mean flying over the world with the hoverbike and the Korok Mask to see if something comes up. At this point I had no real clue where I should be looking, so I simply flew around aimlessly.
Gaps in my Hero's Path all just led to empty places and I also couldn't rely on the Hero's Path to begin with, because I may have passed a Korok without noticing, either because I wasn't wearing the Korok Mask at the time or because there was too much vertical distance. And this even turned out to be true for most of my latest additions.
After collecting all Korok Seeds in Breath of the Wild thrice and having found over 990 Korok Seeds in this game, I really expected the last ones to be devilishly hidden in the most obscure places. But this wasn't case, quite the opposite. We're talking about the 101 of Korok puzzles here, giving witness to how lacklusterly I must have been exploring this re-used world in the beginning. Still, spoiler warning for incoming Korok locations! Skip this section if you're still hunting yourself.
Well, of course one Korok was waiting around Hebra. There just had to be, where this never has been my favorite area. But I usually struggle with all the verticality, while this one was close to the flat area, at the east edge of Kopeeki Drifts. This was actually stone circle, which you can all spot on the map. To be fair, it was a very small stone circle, but I probably should have found this one months ago...
Another obvious candidate is the above fellow found on the big stalagmite in the middle of the Skull Lake. This practically reeks of Korok and I'm surprised that there wasn't already one there in Breath of the Wild.
I've said it multiple times that there is a Korok under almost every bridge now, but yet they still manage to hide from me under bridges, in this case the Great Zora Bridge. Well, it's so far below that the Korok Mask won't react when you cross said bridge, but this was a treasure chest spot before. Okay, there were a ton of treasure chests to find in Breath of the Wild, so this doesn't necessarily mean anything, but this little river bank certainly sticks out.
The most embarrassing entry in this Hall of Korok Shame was waiting on the Nephra Hill, north of the Gerudo Canyon. It's so embarrassing, because this is area with absolutely nothing there, except for one rock that sticks out like a sore thumb. And I have flown over this area multiple times, where my Hero's Path even came very close to it... I probably didn't wear the Korok Mask at the time, but I should have seen this from miles away nevertheless.
At least this gave me the confidence that finding all Koroks without using a guide map on the internet is absolutely doable. I've always had the feeling that the Koroks are a bit easier to spot than they were in Breath of the Wild. Well, there are still exceptions, but for the most part you don't even need the Korok Mask.
But this also meant that I had to consider that I'm dealing with some personal blind spots in case of the last three Korok Seeds. So, there might be places with a Korok where I've already been close and for some reason decided that I have no reason to ever look there again. And when I study the map, I usually dismiss places that already have something there, like a shrine or another Korok. But there is no rule that prevents the game from having two Koroks right next to each other or a Korok next to a shrine...
You can imagine how I must have felt when I discovered that there was one last backpack Korok waiting for me, right next to the Siwakama Shrine, at the east edge of the Gerudo Desert. I honestly thought that the one in Akkala (see entry 33) was the last of its kind. But here we are, one last ride to re-unite two friends.
It was even one of the more challenging rides, because the area is patrolled by a Molduga and then you have to cross a lot of sinkholes. I could have just used the hoverbike, but one last time I wanted to do it with the given means. Yihaha!
And to find a double at this stage was hitting the Korok Seed jackpot. But my joy didn't last all too long, because I realized that the double Koroks still only give you 0.04% of map completion... Which put me before a new problem.
The Missing .04%
There are topics all over the internet of people who have found all Korok Seeds, but ended up with 99 point something percent of map completion. This is what can happen if you simply follow a guide map. This even happened to me at the end of my Master Mode playthrough of Breath of the Wild. But I was convinced that this isn't going to happen to me this time, that I'm not going to be one of those people. If you search everywhere with no clue where to look for things, then you will very likely activate all location names and such things.
And it would have added up perfectly if it weren't for this one double Korok that I had just found. Now I was at 99.91% with only one more Korok Seed to find, which meant that I was missing something else somewhere. With the last Korok I'm at least sure that it won't be in the Depths and very sure that it's not in some cave (despite the exceptions). But this one last missing thing on the map could have been anywhere...
At first I was considering that I could be missing a Device Dispenser somewhere, which do count for the 100%. I even went back to the Fire Temple and the Construct Factory, just to see if there might be a second one at those locations. And I looked into all the orb-shaped sky islands again, because the bigger ones have a dispenser inside them, so maybe one of the smaller ones has one as well. But this wasn't the case. Then there are all the Forge Constructs, small mines and groves in the Depths, where it's easy to miss one, but I seemed to have all of those as well.
And while I'm still determined to find that last Korok Seed on my own, no matter how long it takes, this mystery was so baffling that I decided to use a guide after all, just to find whatever I'm missing. Specifically, I was using the one on gamewith.net.
The very helpful part here were the list of caves with multiple exits, where each exits counts as an individual entry. I was very thorough with exploring all the caves, so I didn't think that this was it, but I had to double-check anyway. And indeed there was one very sneaky cave exit, where I've never went through it, because I hadn't realized that it acted as one.
I'm talking about the Lake Ferona Cave, where you had this little quest with the moon shining through the round entrance... Except that it wasn't the entrance, but a separate hole above, which also counts as its own way in and out of the cave. It makes sense, but from my memory I thought that there was just one way into the cave and that this was where the moon shined through...
But now the last Korok Seed should bring me to 100%, once I manage to find it. I can take my sweet time with it, though, because I'm also still missing four more meals and Kiana is a slow poke. But in the race of what I'm going to finish first, the recipe book or the Korok Seeds, the latter is definitely leading.
Well, this means that there will be one last entry coming to this blog series to tell you where the very last Korok was hiding and to wrap it all up. So, stay tuned!
Progress:
- Korok Seeds: 999/1000 (+6)
- Recipes: 224/228 (+32)
- Map Completion: 99.95%
