The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

the stats in Breath of the Wild are inside you

man, josh thinking this shit too hard is the last thing I expected

also in awe of trayce. Thought this whole time was just bad at lynels. Turns out just bomb arrow expert.

That woman's face
That is classic
YOU CAN BACKFLIP?
Doodle-doodle-doodle-doo-doop! *expression*

Im baffled how she missed the tutorial. I'm a noob and I feel like it was right in my face, being directed to that shrine? It was so long ago tho, I cant remember.

i feel like this streamer's existence proves my claim about the poor design of this game

josh what weapons are you using ?

once off the plateau - I’ve got a few travelers swords (which deal w red bokoblin), a few soldiers swords (which deal w blue bokoblin handily) and a couple of soldier’s bows. are you making sure to aim for headshots with your bow too? got min max those arrows

I've gotten a lot of weapons, a variety of swords (I had no idea any particular sword was better suited to any particular enemy; is that in their description?) but they've all broken quickly and I've found myself in a long stretch with no good enemies to raid for weapons. Well, I mean, there are enemies, but my bombs do virtually no damage and I've been out of arrows for a while. Until it breaks my primary is this big club thing I got from a tall one-eyed doofus I spent forever trying to kill. I did come across (in my journeys) a big camp of the blue/green monsters, the tougher version of the dumb easy guys (bokoblins?), and after taking them out I got a cache of claymores or broadswords or something bigger and stronger. Like, there were several sticking out of the ground. But of course my inventory capacity is tiny, so I only took one or two. Mostly I've been wandering around in search of towers, I can always teleport back to an easier area and raid for weapons. I should probably do that, anyway, to cook some of the food I've found. I don't even have any apples left!

fwiw I did manage to expand capacity once, with the whatever seeds, and since I've found more of those little green guys since then I should probably find a way to upgrade again. I do find the upgrade system (and the cooking system) a little annoying. It's just another step for the sake of another step. Like climbing. I get it, it's part of the game, but it takes foreeeeeever even though (so far) getting to the top of whatever is a foregone conclusion. I have a magic bandana that speeds me up, maybe there will be another thing like that.

I skipped the little battles most of the time and just pulled weapons from whatever shrine or quest I was doing. I was never short of weapons past maybe the first few hours of the game. My approach was to do shrines full-time, periodically doing a divine beast to break up my shrining. That way you build up hearts pretty quickly.

But you have to turn in the shrine baubles, right? At ... prayer statues?

the swords run:

traveler
soldier
knight
royal

the enemies run (in ascending order to HP):
red
blue
black
silver
golden

better swords do more damage. a soldier's sword can quite handily deal with blue enemies

remember you can also sell your jewels (amber, opal, ruby, diamond, etc) to any vendor. there are a few vendors who will give you more for these - but it's not substantially more so on the whole it's best to sell them fairly often in the early game. you can use the cash to buy arrows and/or armour

I do wish you could get the horny fairies to just upgrade a whole bunch of things in a oner instead of having to do each item one by one

I'm having a ton of fun in my second play through - it's a blast not being fully powered up and having to carefully manage my inventory etc.

think I'll play the main quest up to zora's domain and then have a think about what to do next

cooking basics:

- there are various buffs (heat resist, ice resist, strength up etc)
- examples of items which give buffs: spicy peppers (heat resist); iron shroom (defence up); silent shroom (stealth up)
- don't mix buffs, they don't stack - they just cancel each other out and the meal has no status effect
- adding more of the buff ingredient ups the buff
- insects, lizards, frogs etc can be mixed with monster parts to make elixirs
- kill the foxes, boar, deer etc you see around and cook their meat for good meals
- five bananas ; five hearty radish ; five hearty durian = all god tier

ABC

always be cooking
always be climbing

I traded in a bunch of jewels to get the sheikah armour in kakariko - one of the best early game armour sets. it's pricey and I had to kill a stone talus to get enough jewels but they're fairly straightforward - use arrows to hit weak spot on back then when it bends over jump on its back and wail on weak spot with hammer

I've only gotten one hammer once, possibly in an early shrine, and it broke in like one use.

I do have a bunch of gems, maybe I will trade or sell them back in town. though so far I've found all the people in the town so annoying I haven't gone back.

Am I correct that just visiting the towers or visiting the shrines puts them on the map and then makes them a teleport destination? Maybe I will start to prioritize going to the shrines instead of searching for towers, cuz they will give me plenty of teleport spot.

yes exactly

there are always hammers at stables I think fwiw

Also note that hammers are much more durable when used on rocks, to get gems. They break easily when used on enemies

The only cooking worth doing is 5x gourmet meat to sell for more rupees

I don't remember what the rupees were for, really, except the homo house and horny fairy #4

I do wish you could get the horny fairies to just upgrade a whole bunch of things in a oner instead of having to do each item one by one

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my pet peeve with the fairies is that EVERY SINGLE TIME i upgrade a level one armor the fairy is like "Oh, you do know about set bonuses, right?" YES I BELIEVE YOU HAVE LITERALLY TOLD ME SEVERAL HUNDRED TIMES AT THIS POINT.

5 x banana + barbarian armour is good for lionel hunting

someone else made this

https://i.embed.ly/1/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FwHutyvN.jpg%3Ffb&key=522baf40bd3911e08d854040d3dc5c07

on my first save I had just bought the lynel mask off kilton and mini lynel link was SUPER CUTE

5 x banana + barbarian armour is good for lionel hunting

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i didn't think banana effects and barbarian effects stacked?

I didn't know that - only stacks to level three apparently

better approach is apparently ancient armour set + ancient weapon + mighty banana meal

barbarian armour set + def up would presumably be good too

this thread revive has motivated me to reinstall botw and do some post-game cleanup + DLC, once i'm done with dead cells

in some village I just encountered some statue that enigmatically stole some of my stamina but gave me a heart. I don't know what's up with that.

there's a shrine I really want to get to, but I have to find some way to sneak past all the bad guys in a skull fort right outside of it. it keeps raining, which means I can't scale the cliff and sneak up. there's an example of something that is pretty cool but also pretty annoying. The rain. just makes things either look bleak or makes it hard to do for no good reason. as far as I can tell.

by the way, I see that there are walkthroughs for this game online, but how do you pull that off in an open world environment? I can totally see seeking out help on a case-by-case basis, but this game does not seem designed for "do this than that than this in such and such order."

If you’re in Zora realm then the rain won’t stop until you beat the divine beast there

josh: you can cook stamina foods that will help you get up those slippery slopes. i also think there were some armors that increase your climbing grip/ability

there will always be a way around every obstacle in this game

Josh, the walkthroughs chart a course to/through the four divine beasts quests and detail how to unlock and solve the shrines. They’re arranged more or less arbitrarily.

I'm doing a pretty good job evading enemies, or at least outrunning them, and I have a couple of good weapons. Though I do keep running out of arrows, which has been a problem on multiple occasions. Haven't been bothering with most sidequests, still want to focus on towers and shrines. That shrine radar is pretty generous in terms of distance. It starts beeping and I look all around and see nothing except a shrine somewhere way off in the distance and I think, huh, is that it?

Should say that a few enemies so far are super fast (like these lizards that were hanging out on a swimming platform in tropical land) and some of the chopping mall guardians that keep finding newer and faster ways to kill you. I prefer the puzzle shrines, which are annoying but at least more achievable (at least for now).

yeah, i did a long stretch of shrine-grinding pretty early on, both because they were fun and also to get more hearts/stamina.

i usually skipped the ones that combat-focused, leaving those til near the end of the game.

Josh if you want, I'd also recommend googling "things I wish I'd known about botw before staring playing' or similar.

(not a dig! I did this and it pointed out some "oh - DUH" stuff that really helped!)

Also early game strategy for me was: it is perfectly ok to just RUN AWAY from some things. Do not even try to fight lynels, rock monsters or Hinox - leave them sleeping.

One thing I do like about this open world thing is that, despite my frustration of having no real sense of direction (in every sense), the flip side of that is that by just wandering around and screwing around and screwing up with no bosses or clock running down or whatever to deal with, it does give me a good sense of the world/game. In fact, at this point - and I don't know how much time I'll ultimately be able to give this game - I can imagine doing just what I'm doing for hours and hours and days and days, not advancing the story or fighting battles or doing much of anything of much importance, just climbing and flying and doing my stuff. I keep finding new environments and terrain and enemies, which is fun.

I did get struck by lighting for the first time today. I knew I was supposed to take off all my metal gear but I was basically like, psh, who the fuck cares, getting struck by lightning seems easier than rushing to avoid it.

Hi yes my possibly 300+ hours of gameplay concur with the just farting around exploring approach.

Popped back in to play a bit more today. Made some progress on towers and shrines, but man, I'll concede I'm not that clever about these things and certainly not patient, but having looked up a couple shrine walkthroughs as needed there is just no way I would have figured some of the puzzles out and, for that matter, there are already a couple of shrines I got stuck on whose solutions just seems like such frustrating bullshit that I'm just not going to bother with them at all.

Josh are you smart

Who can say? But also impatient, which really offsets any smarts. Because if there's a stupid shrine that doesn't take smarts, just patience and a million attempts, like the one where you have a to carry a ball, and use stasis, and limbo under lasers ... yeah, I just don't care enough to do that over and over again.

a boy used to carry a ball in the street

I played this for the first time since early November this past weekend. I think wondering around and exploring was what I needed to hear, cuz that’s what I did and it was fun. As opposed to fucking with that 2nd Ancient Beast that I think made me quit last time.

i did look up solutions for a couple of the dungeons, those weren't quite my thing, but the shrines were never anything i felt i had to walkthrough, and usually walkthroughs are my first resort - i grew up playing adventure games whose idea of a "puzzle" was some mensa bullshit. i kind of love most of the shrines in breath of the wild because i did solve them by just playing around and experimenting, some of them not in the "right" way. if one is inclined to think that sort of playing style "stupid" i could see it getting frustrating though.

I've seen videos of amazing methods people used to by pass some shrine puzzles. I cheated on some myself - I just couldnt work the puzzles out - I'm not ashamed lol. But the ones where its not a matter of looking anything up, just timing such as platformer jumps and fights... yeah.

Yeah also what rusho said, in that there isnt any one "right" way to do a lot of this stuff.

(case in point: saw someone on reddit use a bomb and blow themselves up to fling the body over a chasm to skip a whole section in a shrine, lol)

I had so many lightbulb moments doing shrines, i'd get frustrated and turn off, but then come back the next day and suddenly figure out how to do it. That was a lovely feeling.

(Although most of my lightbulb moments were me suddenly thinking, "oh yeah, magnesis, duh")