[skyrwayl] Some BOTW notes

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Lots of energetic rhino beetles in Torin Wetland (at night, not raining, etc.), though one has to deal with 2 Guardians (which are part of the Hobbies Of The Rich side quest).

There are a pair of very fast respawning blue lizalfos in Cora Lake, easily accessible from Lake Tower. They respawn much faster than every blood moon: teleporting back to Lake Tower is enough.  They are useful for farming lizalfos tails for armor upgrades.

Neither of the above two show up on online published BOTW object maps.

One can safely farm arrows from the pair of bokoblin archers near the Great Plateau Tower.  Pick a point on the perpendicular bisector between them so both of their arrows travel the same distance toward you.  Stand just out of range, collect arrows til they stop sticking (typically about 10), save, reload, and repeat.  It's neat that one could leave the Great Plateau for the first time armed already to the teeth with a huge number of arrows.

The best cooking pots are at Zora's Domain and Korok Village: fairly close to shrines (fast travel), always lit, easy access to merchants for selling cooked stuff.

One can grind the lynel in the Coliseum Ruins with bombs because you have the high ground.  We may have also used some arrows.  When the lynel starts aiming arrows, run in a circle because the lynel extrapolates your position (leads its shot) only linearly.

One can safely and easily grind Molduga with just bombs thrown from high ground.  Quickest is to alternate throwing both types of bombs.

Hateno Village is pot lid city.  There's also a rusty shield on a roof.  Having a large stockpile of disposable shields is good for taking out decayed Guardians with shield parry, especially early in the game when you don't have powerful weapons.  A successful shield parry of a Guardian laser is a 600 HP attack.  Other easy shields can be found on item maps, e.g., https://f.leolam.fr/botw-map/.  Convenient ones are near teleport locations.

The 2 lizalfos swimming in the river between the Dueling Peaks can be safely killed with bombs thrown from Ree Dahee shrine.  This area is often one of the first areas visited after leaving the Great Plateau, so doing things safely without using weapons is highly preferable.  One can also safely destroy the bokoblin camp nearby with bombs from the ledge above.  This makes the river safe to farm (bomb fishing of course!) for the Staminoka bass plentiful there, which are extremely useful early in the game.

A few NPCs, after completing a quest, will continue to buy an item from you at a higher price than other merchants: Jogo (flint), Juney (baked apples), Kima (fireproof lizards), Pirou (rushrooms), Ramella (gemstones), Trott (raw gourmet meat).

Proposed project for YouTube etc: demonstrate killing various enemies from afar using only bombs.

Another, "The God of War": Demonstrate killing a large number of varied enemies, perhaps in artistically varied ways.  The Castle might be good for this.

According to object maps, there are about 150 laser-active guardians.  It seems within the realm of possibility for a speedrunner to defeat all of them in one blood moon cycle.  Blood moons do not occur while in Hyrule Castle, so one actually only needs to kill all the guardians outside the castle before a blood moon.  However, such a challenge might not be very satisfying, because, for speed, it will likely just be boring repeated use of ancient arrows, and one will not stop to pick up guardian parts.

A monumental task: collect (farm) 999 of every material and arrow.

There's a long road (with lots of monsters), Lanayru Road, extending from Kakariko Village to Naydra Snowfield.  It is not marked on the map.  Are there others?  Define "road" as "a path that a horse will naturally follow".  Some other such roads: castle exterior, footrace minigame, Satori mountain, Ancient Columns, Taran Pass

Here are some mundane tasks, mostly within the theme of acquiring or using resources:

1. mow the grass
2. farm satori mountain
3. farm elsewhere
4. deforest
5. shop
6. castle
7. cook and sell
8. miniboss, guardian, lynel
9. minigame
10. test of strength shrine
11. golf
12. use an armor set bonus
13. sightseeing from horse
14. try a speedrunner strat

The more arrows one pumps into Blupee, the more rupee gems it emits.  I reserve my special 5-shot Lynel bow only for shooting Blupee (from close range, all 5 arrows hit).  Maybe more if you midair shoot multiple times while time is slowed.  Contest: how many gems can you extract from one Blupee?  (Update: spear also works well.)

The first shrine I tried after leaving the Great Plateau was one visible from the Tower: Kaam Ya'tak the Trial of Power.  Ironically, this shrine is arguably the most difficult shrine, so it was kind of trollish of Nintendo to have put it invitingly right next to the Great Plateau.  With so many sections requiring so many different skills, and being so new to the game, it took me over 6 hours to complete.  I guess it thematically pairs with the nearby Central Tower which is arguably the most difficult tower.

Bokoblins of any color can easily be blown around with a Korok leaf, and also any color dies instantly in water.  This makes the Korok leaf a very powerful weapon late in the game when bokoblins have scaled up so are otherwise time-consuming or expensive to kill.  Unfortunately, the very mechanism (water) that kills them so easily also (probably) makes inaccessible the ores that silver bokoblins drop.  I guess bombs also continue to work for knockback.

Challenge: how much ore can you collect in (say) 1 hour?  Measure amount by total market value.  Or, before a blood moon.

LevelUp Royal has a nice BOTW playthrough, of which the early videos can serve as a nice early-game guide.  Some additions:

1. More details on enemy scaling.  In particular, one only earns "overall K.O. credit" until 10 kills of any particular type of enemy.  If you want enemies to level up quickly, your priorities should also include defeating blight Ganons in divine beasts, and beating Ganon (beating the game).  However, I'm not really convinced that leveling up your enemies to silver is all that useful: they drop nice weapons, but nice weapons can be obtained from elsewhere; they drop gems, but gems can be obtained from elsewhere.
2. Decayed guardians can be tipped over with ice blocks or magnesis-controlled plates, for more guardian parts.

LevelUp Royal's guide might be a little too detailed, taking the fun out discovering things on your own.  If so, here is some more vague early-game advice:

1. Various ways for dealing with weapon durability: defeating or stealing from enemies, sneaking to avoid combat, weapons in treasure chests, locating weapons laying around not in treasure chests.  The ones not in treasure chests respawn every blood moon.  Note that if you choose not to pick up a weapon in a treasure chest, you can come back to it later, even those in shrines.  However, keeping track of what treasure chests to come back to might be arduous.  But for shrines, a treasure chest icon (counterintuitively) appears next to the shrine name on the map if all its chests are empty.
2. Increasing weapon inventory size may also help deal with durability issues.  But if you want to increase it a lot early in the game, finding Korok seeds and Hestu probably requires consulting a more specific online guide.  There are also guides for obtaining infinite Korok seeds, but those glitches perhaps involve things that would spoilers in the early game.
3. The various DLC armor also indirectly help with weapon durability.  Nintendo probably recognized weapon durability to be a problem and designed the DLC armor to address it.
4. Talk to the kids in Hateno Village to get pointed toward a way to exchange heart containers for stamina vessels and vice versa.  You can easily change your mind on what you spend your spirit orbs on.  The loading screen hint for this is more useful in Japanese than in English.  "Granter of Boons: In the farthest reaches of the world is a being who will trade heart pieces and stamina."  In Japanese, "Hateno-Mura" is a pun meaning "village at the end of the world".  The pun is translated in the French and Italian localizations.  Perhaps some variation of "Termina" would have been a better English name, referencing another Zelda game.  (Tangentially, Finisterre and Finstère are real places in Spain and France, respectively.)
5. Rupees: From a certain point of view, every material eventually becomes useful for some purpose other than selling for rupees.  But from another point of view, no material is that important, because one can always acquire more.  Further along in the game when that material is more useful, you will have also gained the abilities to get the material relatively easily.  Early in the game, best is probably to sell ores, monster parts that you have a lot of, and meats cooked into meals.  Don't sell guardian parts.
6. There are many things may seem hard at first but become easy with the proper other things.  Then there are a few things which are arguably bad game design.  They remain difficult no matter what you have, and they are not distinguished, marked, in a way signifying them as unusually difficult.  (Examples: a certain Korok puzzle, a certain level in Trial of the Sword.)  The moral of the story is, be quick to give up "for now" and move on to other challenges.  Because you can do that in an open world game! (But not in Trial of the Sword.)
7. I found the cooking system too complicated to decode by experimentation; it was more satisfying to read how it works in an online guide.

Some open questions currently not covered by any guide or map that I could find:

1. Which items respawn faster than every blood moon?  What triggers their respawn?
2. Where are all the healing hot springs?  Free beds?

Arguments in favor of completing all 4 divine beasts as early as possible: Urbosa's Fury is one of the best weapons in the game.  Revali's Gale is the most useful ability in the game.  (Because the game is a climbing simulator.)  (These two Champions' abilities are therefore also worth upgrading to Plus as early as possible with the Champions' Ballad DLC.)  Great Eagle Bow is one of the best bows in the game.  Lightscale Trident is one of the best spears in the game.  Boulder Breaker is the best mining weapon and one of the best two-handed weapons in the game.  The latter two weapons are especially useful against Talus.  Champions' weapons are relatively easy to replace, assuming you've found Ledo, the luminous stone/diamond trader.  Completing Vah Rudania unlocks Ramella, the most profitable way to sell precious gems, albeit in randomly chosen 10-stacks.  Completing all divine beasts and then the Champions' Ballad DLC allows one to acquire Master Cycle Zero (Vah Epona), the best horse in the game.

The call (scream, screech) of Vah Medoh is that of a real bird, the red-tailed hawk.  It is a little bit startling to hear it in real life if you aren't used to hearing it.  Vah Rudania, the divine beast of the volcano region, is a salamander because salamanders have mythological connection to fire.

Playing the game efficiently, with the best tools, may appeal to some players but not other players.  It takes away the feeling of exploration, and of doing things badly then learning, growing, from your mistakes.  It takes away the challenges of solving problems with not the best tools, though you can always choose not to use anything you have.

What should one do to comfortably (i.e., not speedrunner style) complete all divine beasts fairly early?  Increase stashes.  Maybe Master Sword.  More.

Unfortunately, completing a divine beast prevents you from fighting its Blight Ganon as many times as you wish (trying different strategies) at the castle, which you can only do if you haven't defeated the Blight at its divine beast.  Therefore, also consider playing the game without doing divine beasts:

You would miss out on all the benefits above, and the following.  Some shrine quests remain inaccessible, so ultimately no Of The Wild armor for completing all shrines, nor its set bonus after upgrading it twice (Master Sword Beam attack damage increasing from 1/3 to 1/2 of a direct strike with the sword).  Zora's Domain remains eternally raining, making it unpleasant to do anything there.  No nice weapons dropped by enemies at the Coliseum.  Kilton won't stock many interesting things.