In both The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, one of the biggest complaints from fans is how limited the stable system is. Put simply, while you could ride numerous mounts in the game (from horses to bears and Stalhorses), only regular horses were allowed in stables.

This made things like the Lord of the Mountain and Stalhorses useless, since they were impossible to keep for longer than half an hour or so.

But did you know this wasn’t always the case? That Tears of the Kingdom may have actually let you register other mounts at some point?

Yep, as dataminers have found out, it’s entirely possible to save Stalhorses and the Lord of the Mountain in a stable in the game. Here’s our video with more info:

And for non-viewers, that’s very interesting for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, Breath of the Wild didn’t allow anything like this at all. In that game, adding otherwise impossible ‘mounts’ to your stable would break the game entirely, and render the save file unwinnable.

So, to see them possible to keep in its sequel shows the devs had at least some intention of letting players use those mounts for themselves.

Then there’s the Lord of the Mountain itself.

In normal gameplay, it doesn’t show up outside of cutscenes. It appears when you place an apple in a bowl under a cherry blossom tree, and that’s it.

These cutscenes are the only place you ever usually encounter the Lord of the Mountain/Satori

Heck, it doesn’t even have a Hyrule Compendium entry to its name!

So, not only is the fact you can ‘own’ the Lord of the Mountain strange, but the fact it even exists in a rideable form is bizarre in its own right too.

For some reason, the LotM is actually rideable in Tears of the Kingdom

After all, why even have the actor rideable to begin with? Every other NPC or object you can’t interact with isn’t designed to be fully interactable like this.

Take Ganondorf himself for example. You can’t interact with him in the prologue or Gloom’s Origin outside of a cutscene, at least in his mummified form.

So, the game is built with that in mind. If you go out of bounds or use other glitches to get there, he doesn’t do anything in said state. You can’t hurt him (or vice versa), he has no dialogue, and there’s no possible to interact with him in any meaningful way.

If you clip out of bounds to meet Ganondorf before his boss battle, he won’t do anything

And the same goes for plenty of other things too. Most of the map outside of the Gerudo Town defence mission is low poly or entirely invisible, since you’re never intended to go there. The models used for the fake Zelda in Regional Phenomena cutscenes have no animations or interaction if encountered outside of those cutscenes, because you’re never meant to approach them. All of Hyrule outside of the Divine Beast Rudania dungeon in Breath of the Wild is gone, since you’re never meant to leave the crater.

Because you’re never meant to reach Gloom’s Origin in the Gerudo Town defence mission, the entire area is completely invisible in that part of the game

Put simply, if the player is never meant to interact with an NPC or object, or visit a location, Nintendo won’t make it possible to interact with via sequence breaking or hacking, at least in 99.9% of cases. There’s no reason to put the effort in for something only 0.01% of players will ever see.

So the fact the Lord of the Mountain is still a rideable mount in this game, that it can somehow be registered in a stable, and that it’s literally been nerfed/changed to remove things that would make it impractical as a normal horse (infinite stamina, instantly vanishing when hit/when Link dismounts it, etc) gives us the impression that Nintendo wanted you to be able to ride this animal at some point in time. That Nintendo actually did foresee it being acquired by Link in a sidequest, and that it needed to be rebalanced for such a situation.

Either way, that’s how Stalhorses and the Lord of the Mountain were once registerable mounts in Tears of the Kingdom, and how only the stable owners’ insistence stops you from keeping them for good. Hopefully you found this interesting, and we’ll hope to cover more unused content and video game oddities in future articles as well.