Let’s Mess Around With… The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild Glitches!
Earlier this year, The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild was released to massive critical acclaim. With an expansive and content filled world, fantastic characters and fun gameplay mechanics galore, the game has become one of the highest rated titles in the entire Zelda franchise.
Like Zelda 1, A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time before it, it’s become a modern classic.
And just like those other Nintendo classics, Breath of the Wild is filled with fun glitches to try out. From auto healing on a horse to clipping through walls and getting objects stuck in houses, the game is absolutely jam packed with interesting bugs for the bored player to mess around with.
So join us, as we go and look at some of the best glitches you can do in Zelda Breath of the Wild!
Blood Moon Clipping
Starting with an extremely interesting one based around the game’s Blood Moon mechanic. Basically, if you haven’t played Breath of the Wild, Blood Moons appear on random days and reset most of the game world to its default state. In other words, they cause enemies and weapons to respawn so players can fight/get them again.
It’s a clever mechanic, and a neat way to keep the open world lively once the player gets powerful enough to clear it out. However, Nintendo didn’t think of certain effects it might have on the game.
Like in this case, what happens if an enemy respawns on top of the player. So what happens?
Well, Link gets shoved through the floor, that’s what. And in Hyrule Castle (where Blood Moons can only be activated by a campfire), that has some… strange effects:
Such as being trapped under a Guardian Turret until you warp out or reload your save file. Or being forced into deadly Malice until Link keels over due to the poison.
But most interestingly of all is what happens when you try this on a Turret near the Sanctum. Why? Well, see for yourself:
Link goes straight through the castle! The results are absolutely spectacular.
Cause yep, you can see absolutely everything in the castle from one spot. Yet that’s not all that’s interesting here.
Oh no, the game’s physics for the castle… weren’t really built for you to come at this angle. So the game absolutely freaks out with things like water physics, with Link doing stuff like floating up 20 feet through invisible water or even being able to swim diagonally down a stream of water coming from a chamber at a higher elevation.
It’s quite a sight to behold, and definitely worth checking out if you’ve got the free time. But before you do that, I think it might be time to look at another bug in the game…
Kilton Lag Hell
One which exists because Nintendo forget a minor failsafe in Breath of the Wild. Namely, forgetting to check if an object was on the spot where Kilton’s shop appears before it loads in.
Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh. They do check that to some degree. If Link is sitting on the spot where the shop should be when night comes, it doesn’t appear. Instead, it waits until Link is a certain number of metres away and looking in the opposite direction first.
Unfortunately for Nintendo, that’s all they bothered to check for. So if a horse, giant metal crates or a Guardian happens to be on the spot where the shop should appear, it will appear like normal. And that’s when things go a little out of control:
That’s because the game’s engine is designed to push overlapping objects away from each other. But things like horses, boxes and Guardians are giant objects with lots of parts and various laws of physics applied to them.
The engine cannot cope with this at all, and the frame rate basically falls to about 3 FPS as a result. It doesn’t quite crash, but it’s clear the game is about to, and it’s possible a few more objects there would send it falling down like a house of cards.
Either way, that’s not all the bug does either. Oh no, when a box or object is inside Kilton’s shop, where do you think Kilton ends up?
Well, he gets pushed out of the shop, that’s where. So not only does the game lag to hell and back, but poor Kilton gets stuck wandering in circles outside the shop as well! It’s pretty cool really, especially given how he has animations you will never be able to see in normal gameplay.
Oh, and talking about overloading the game…
Permanently Lost Inventory
The developers of this game also overlooked what would happen if your inventory was full before being given a piece of armour by an NPC. Now, for those that don’t know, you can have a maximum of 5 pages of armour pieces in your inventory at any one time. You’ll never get there of course (since even with all Amiibo and DLC you won’t reach page 5), but that’s the limit.
This is fine when your next armour piece is from a store (you get told you can’t buy it), or a chest (it automatically closes itself back up again). Both situations have fallbacks to cope with this unlikely situation.
Talking to NPCs… usually doesn’t. So you’ll go and say, ask Riju for the Thunder Helm, and this will happen:
Yep, it’s just gone forever. No message or anything. Just whatever item you were going to get being permanently erased from existence.
It’s the kind of thing that’d usually be a pretty serious bug. However, that’s not really the case here.
Why? Well for one thing, 90% of armour handed to you by NPCs is optional. If you lose one of these:
- Thunder Helm
- Rubber Helm
- Champion’s Shirt
- Zora Greaves
It’s awkward, but you can live without it. And while the Zora Armour being lost can make part of the quest unwinnable, this situation will never happen in normal gameplay. You would have to be out of your mind to have filled five pages of armour before going after the Divine Beasts. It’s like running out of sand in Super Mario Bros 2. Or locking yourself out the Nautical Exhibit in Luigi’s Mansion 2.
It could happen, but if you’re not doing it deliberately, you are the worst player on the planet. Still, if you’ve got a file you want to screw up, it’s one to try out.
Horse Clipping
Still, back to less ‘dangerous’ bugs now. With a well known one called horse clipping that lets you bypass walls in the game.
How does it work?
Well to put it simply, if you jump off a horse, save in mid air and reload, the game puts you behind the horse when the game restarts.
What it doesn’t do however is check if there’s a wall there. So you can move a horse up to a wall, jump off, save in mid air and reload to clip inside it.
Normally the effects of this are pretty limited. You go up to a cliff, use the glitch and then realise that there’s another wall behind the first one. So you’re trapped in about 6 feet of empty space with no way out.
But this changes when buildings are involved. With a Sheikah Tower, Link can clip inside the tower itself and realise the light pillar isn’t solid. With a house, Link can actually end up standing on someone’s bed (maybe even with them in it!).
And in a few other cases, he can end up inside objects like rocks, dead Guardians and random obstacles. These also turn out to be completely hollow on the inside.
So yeah, go and experiment with it if you’re bored. Because depending where you are, absolutely anything could happen here…
Shrine Wrong Co-ordinate Warping
Which is also something you can say about this shrine glitch too. Basically, it lets you change where you enter the shrine from, allowing Link to end up out of bounds.
So how does it work?
Well to begin with, you’ll need to find a shrine and enter it. Once that’s done (and the auto save made), return to an older save file and go to a ledge you can jump down from.
Next, press A to jump down and pause at the same time. Save the game, and then reload the file with the shrine…
Voila. The cutscene goes all wrong and Link ends up starting miles away from where he should be. Usually this means a trip to the endless void (since he loads outside the shrine’s walls), but occasionally he can also appear in walls, on top of high ledges or even in the final room next to the Monk!
You just have to hope you get lucky punk!
On Top of a Shrine Roof
But hey, if you don’t want to rely on luck, there’s another way out of bounds in a shrine too. To use it, first pick the Kah Okeo Shrine on the South Tabantha region.
Once you’re there, make your way to the giant tower of blocks you destroy with bombs. Now here’s where it gets a bit nuts.
Basically, land on the platform, then blow it up with you nearby. You’ll plummet into the pit as the tower crumbles, and when the game reloads…
Link will be on top of the shrine’s roof. That’s because your destinated spawn point was the tower, which doesn’t exist.
So as a fallback, the game placed you at the same position on the nearest piece of ground available. Aka, the invisible roof.
Have fun gliding into the distance!
Horse in a House
Or maybe not, because there are a few more interesting glitches to look at next. For example, have you ever wanted to ride a horse inside a house?
No?
Eh, nor do most people. But thanks to a bug in Tarrey Town, you can!
To use it, start out by going to the town while its being constructed. You’ll notice at least one giant rock that hasn’t been removed to build a house yet.
Next, ride your horse onto the rock. It’s surprisingly easy to do if you hold L and carefully make the horse saunter up.
Finally, finish the sidequest and come back.
You’ll notice the rock is gone, but your horse is nowhere to be seen. So where is he?
Well, enter the house where the rock used to be, and you’ll find he’s trapped on the 1st floor (2nd floor to you American types). Yeah, good luck getting him down from there, since he’s too big to fit through the door.
But hey, at least you can ride him around someone’s attic! That’s interesting I guess?
Hot Spring Storage
Regardless, let’s move onto something new. Namely, a neat way to auto regenerate health in Zelda Breath of the Wild!
No, you’re not reading that wrong. There’s a way to auto regenerate health while riding a horse in this game. It all has to do with a glitch called ‘Hot Spring Storage’.
What do I mean by that?
Well in this game, there are hot springs you can heal Link by having him stand in them. Fair enough, that’s how they’ve worked in Zelda games for a while now.
But Breath of the Wild is no ordinary Zelda game. Oh no, the save system… is a tad broken.
Why? Because it doesn’t clear the game’s memory when you reload a save file. At least, not until Link touches the ground.
That’s fine if Link is on the ground when it reloads. But if he’s on a horse?
Then effects carry over from the previous save state. One of which is that hot spring healing effect mentioned earlier.
So what you want to do is to stand in a hot spring with the water up to about Link’s knees.
Next, reload a save file while you’re on a horse.
And then just watch. Link will start automatically healing there and then, and will continue auto healing until he gets off the horse! It’s a pretty cool trick for getting through dangerous places (like snow covered mountains), since the healing often overrides the weather damage!
Just don’t try and do this after standing in icy cold water…
