Dondons in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, explained

In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomyou may encounter dondonsintriguing elephant-like beasts with tusks in them southern Akkala.

You find the dondons as part of the quest “Potential Princess Sightings”, “The Beast and the Princess”, but the quest doesn’t really tell you what they are Doing. It is known that Zelda rescued these beasts and gave them a sanctuary, but they really have a use: they can give you gems, such as diamonds, rubies and sapphires.

You can’t ride them, unfortunately, but you can feed them luminous stones. Below we describe the process.

Where to find the dondons in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

The dondons are located in a shrine immediately north of Stable on the lake. You can glide straight to where they come from Joju-uu Shrine, if you look for the caretaker’s cooking pot in the distance. (Admittedly, it’s kind of hard to see because of the murky fog in the area, but if you glide north, it pops out.)

Using dondons in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

If you have many luminous stone, you can feed dondons these stones and in return they will poop out some gems. Based on some of our testing, you can get flint, amber, opal, topaz, sapphires, rubies and diamonds, but it’s all up to your own luck. This isn’t a super solid way to get gems, but since it takes time, you might as well test your luck if you’ve got tons of luminescent stones.

Before you dump all your luminous stones into dondons, keep in mind that you’ll need a bunch of them to upgrade Radiant Armor, if you’re planning on doing that.

Feed the dondons by doing the following:

1. Place a luminous stone in front of the dondon you want to feed.
2. Watch the dondon eat the stone.
3. Leave the area. (You can go do something else, but they won’t poop in front of you.)
4. Come back in about 10 minutes.
5. Collect your loot, which will be around the dondon shrine, but not necessarily exactly where the dondon was when you left.
6. Repeat as desired.

And that’s all! There’s no other use for dondons that we know of, but this isn’t too shabby.