How Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom players are breaking an ‘unbreakable’ game

Link isn’t that fast, but he can sprint for a short time – something determined by a stamina wheel that players can upgrade as they progress in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Players clear Sanctuaries and get a Light of Blessing each time, which they can spend on increasing that stamina wheel. It’s a clever system that links Link’s power to his experience, and one that works for the everyday player. Link’s early limitations drop as the game progresses.

But speedrunners are not everyday players. Speedrunners have to go fast; the current official record for beating Tears of the Kingdom is just over an hour, in a game where it’s easy to clock 100 hours without touching the endgame. Tears of the Kingdom at the end of the game, let the player go straight to the big Ganondorf battle; it just takes a little preparation. To get through it quickly, speedrunners and the glitch-hunting community try to break an “unbreakable” game.

Tears of the Kingdomunlike The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for it, is designed to be exploited; after all, the Ascend skill started out as a cheat code for developers. It is built into the game’s new abilities, such as Ultrahand and weapon fusion, which allow the player to create ungodly combinations of things; Ascend, which destroys ceilings to allow Link to swim through rock; and the Recall capability which is useful for rolling back time and errors. Nintendo hasn’t created a true “intended” solution to its puzzles, instead creating a sandbox that allows for experimentation and multiple outcomes. It’s hard to break a game designed around exploits, but the glitch-hunting community has done just that.

None of the glitches the community has found so far are groundbreaking enough to nullify the fledgling sky island tutorial region, or allow players to beat Ganondorf in one shot. Instead, glitch hunters have focused on finding ways to shave off precious seconds Tears of the Kingdom speed runs. It’s things like sprinting without using stamina, which allows Link to travel just a little faster, stacking weapons for more damage, or using Autobuild to fly without building a device.

“I know it sounds like, Oh, why would that be too useful if it only gives him a little boost?speedrunner Carl Wernicke, who goes through gymnast86 online, said Polygon. “But over the course of an entire run, all those little boosts add up to 30 seconds of time saved over the course of an hour-long run.”

Those 30 seconds, combined with other time-saving measures, could mean the difference between breaking a record or not. Then there’s the fall damage cancellation glitch, which allows speedrunners to skip the glider, saving about six minutes, Wernicke said. To pull it off, players must perfect a complicated input sequence.

Wernicke is known for his speed runs in the Legend of Zelda franchise. He was the first unofficial record holder for the Any% run – completing the game’s story without meeting a specific percentage completion threshold – two hours later Tears of the Kingdom was released on May 12, clocking in at approximately 90 minutes. He started speedrunning The Legend of Zelda in 2013 with The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker, his focus is on 3D Zelda games. He continued to break records with Breath of the Wilda game that has been important to understand what makes Tears of the Kingdom Tick.

“It was a pretty safe assumption Tears of the Kingdom was, on a mechanical level, similar to Breath of the WildWernicke said. “The sequel takes place in the same world. Aside from the new things you can do, we didn’t see any major differences in the mechanics based on what was shown before the game came out.

Nintendo has fixed many of the glitches that worked in it Breath of the Wild speedruns (and patches fast Tears of the Kingdom), but that knowledge and expertise has been beneficial to the community, which finds new exploits in a hurry. Wernicke said there are two common ways glitch hunters look for exploits: the first is simply finding things by accident during regular play, or finding and reverse engineering glitches in clips online. However, the most common way is to combine two or more action inputs at the same time and just see what happens.

“There are hundreds of little things you can do in the game,” said Wernicke. “What happens if we combine these things separately to see how the game reacts?”

It’s how the community finds things like squat sprints or throw sprints, which allow Link to run without losing much stamina, or the Recall launch, a move that uses the Recall ability to launch Link into the air – high enough to reach air islands .

A glitch fighter who goes through Blize online used both methods to reverse engineer and extend the Recall launch.

“The process involved a lot of testing and trying to shoot down as many variables as possible,” Blize said. He studied one hitch of using a recalled spear to throw Link into the air, but found the method inconsistent. Blize had to adjust the method to make Link fly as high as possible.

“I started to figure out all the possible factors that could make this glitch work/fail and try to change only one of those variables at a time,” Blize told Polygon. “I clipped each successful launch and flipped through them at the end of play sessions [the recordings] and see if I can detect a pattern. In the end it was [a] little comment in a friend’s voice message about one of those clips that gave me the missing puzzle piece.

The process took Blize about 10 to 15 hours of his 50 hours Tears of the Kingdom, a few hours at a time, to refine the variables he had confidence in. Still, he’s not done yet: “I still believe there’s a way to make this even more consistent and overall better.”

The Discord community is a big part of glitch hunting and speed running; a lot of work happens on Discord servers and is documented in spreadsheets. It’s a way to make the process easier and more iterative, especially when things move so quickly. “It’s a very hectic time because the game just came out,” said Wernicke. “New glitches are discovered every day.” There is power in numbers, he added.

“Sharing knowledge about how things work is hugely crucial to all these different glitches and exploits that can be found,” Wernicke said. “And it’s not just glitches and exploits. You know, like, “This combat strategy saves two seconds,” or “We can go get this food instead of this food here because there’s a better drop rate for this food that we need.”

Glitch hunting is beneficial to the speedrunning community, but it’s also a good thing for the game as a whole, extending the life of an already popular game. The Breath of the Wild community still found new things to Tears of the Kingdom‘s release, and will likely continue to do so in the future.

“It’s great that communities [form] around themes like glitch hunting and speed running of a game as they extend the longevity and experience of great games like Tears of the Kingdom just so much more,” Blize added.