Friday, March 10, 2017

Grab your chopper.

Save your best, favorite and most powerful weapons for the enemies that deserve them. Who’s deserving? The toughest monsters — the ones with the most hit points.

Put differently, don’t waste your powerful weapons on weak enemies.

This keese is on fire, and it still only has 1 HP

Consider the annoying, bat-like Keese. They have exactly one hit point. To kill it with a single hit, you need a weapon that does at least 1 HP of damage. And that pretty much means that any weapon you have will do.

Given that every hit in Breath of the Wild inches a weapon one step closer to explosion (and the best you can do is find random duplicates or reforge some select weapons), then it makes sense to equip your least powerful (and likely least favorite) weapon. In short, use the right weapon for the right enemy.

KEEP A CRAPPY WEAPON

There’s a corollary to this advice, too: It may seem counterintuitive, but you should carry at least one (relatively) crappy weapon. Maybe that’s a low-powered club or a weak sword. It’s up to you. The specifics don't matter. All that matters is that it’s less powerful and, therefore, more expendable.

Don’t let their size fool you: Moblin skeletons have 1 HP, too

Keeping a weapon that’s significantly less powerful than your other weapons means you can quickly pull it out for confrontations with the low-level enemies that roam Hyrule. That includes everything from Keeses to the brownish-red variety of Bokoblins and everything from the smallest skeletons to giant Moblin monsters.

The point? Let your worst weapon take the abuse, and save your better weapons for more powerful enemies where chipping down HP is essential, and every hit chips off more HP.

THE BEST CRAPPY WEAPONS FOR FIGHTING AND BREAKING

In Breath of the Wild, we’re always on the lookout for two crappy weapons to keep in our inventory — though, to be fair, thinking of them as weapons is the wrong way to approach it. They stink for fighting almost everything — except the weakest of enemies.

The iron sledgehammer and the woodcutter’s axe don’t have much in the way of power, but (at least based on our experience) they’re among the toughest weapons in the game. They won’t do much damage, but they won’t break easily, either.

Where can you find these? Just about every stable has a woodcutter’s axe. There’s a ledge on the cliff wall by the Owa Daim shrine in the Great Plateau where you can find an iron sledgehammer.

Both of these weapons have a bonus feature, too: Because they’re so tough, you can use them to break crates and jewel-filled rocks. Don’t waste your powerful weapons breaking them. Save them for enemies.

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Grinder.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an enormous game with an open world full of places to explore and stuff that will kill you. These kinds of challenges will be familiar if you’ve played recent entries in the Elder Scrolls or Fallout series, but the game might be a bit overwhelming if you’re a casual Nintendo fan.

I’m going to help by pointing out ways to increase your power quickly, as well as explain the most efficient ways to get the stuff you need to undertake the game’s challenges. This information could be seen as spoilers if you want to figure everything out for yourself, so this is your warning.

The first step is ...

IDENTIFY YOUR NEEDS

It’s best to think about open world games as having two interwoven progression paths. The first is the narrative; following the quests and spooling out the game’s story. The second path is exploration, and that can be either aimless and free-form or the deliberate pursuit of power-enhancing items that are outside the main quest.

Generally, the difficulty of the story quests’ will ramp up more quickly than those quests dole out power, nudging you to go exploring. Exploration, however, rarely pushes you back onto the quest path. You can spend dozens of hours combing the world for powerful stuff, and then return to the main quest wielding god-killer weapons and wearing armor that is basically an Iron Man suit.

Stomping through the story quests with overwhelming force can feel like a brilliant plan paying off, or it can feel like playing on easy mode. It’s all in how you look at it, and how you prefer to play. There is no “right” approach.

Regardless of whether you’re playing story quests or venturing into the most dangerous parts of Hyrule in pursuit of phat schwag however, you need three things:

Arrows
Consumables that heal and buff you
Cash money to pay for armor and upgrades

Here is how you begin that process.

COLLECT THE SHRINES

The most straightforward path of power progression in the game is solving shrines. There are 120 of these mini-dungeons hidden around Hyrule, and each has a puzzle to solve or a combat challenge and awards you a Spirit Orb. Four Spirit Orbs can be traded for a heart container or a vessel to increase your stamina wheel.

Beyond getting a map that shows you the shrine locations, or walkthroughs for individual shrines, there’s no real shortcut to this process. You just have to go to all the shrines and solve the puzzles. Find a high spot, take out your scope and mark all the shrines you see and head to ‘em.

It is worth noting that shrines are fast-travel points, so when you find an enemy with a powerful weapon, or if you find a cluster of a useful commodity, you can mark it on your map with a stamp, and teleport to the closest shrine to collect the loot whenever it respawns.

BE PREPARED TO GRIND

You’re going to need a lot of arrows to fire at enemies who are too dangerous to risk engaging in hand-to-hand combat if you’re headed into the harder areas, and you’re also going to need consumables to heal the massive damage these enemies will deal you and to buttress your paltry defenses and insufficient stamina early in the game.

You’ll find the route from Inogo Bridge up to Zora’s Domain pretty early in the game, and it is extremely lucrative. It is populated by lots of Lizalfos soldiers who frequently drop bundles of five to 10 arrows. The route is a path through a canyon — so you won’t get lost — and the river that you walk along is full of useful fish you can grab on the way.

Those fish include Armored Carp, which can be cooked into food that gives a powerful buff to your defense. You’ll also find Staminoka Bass which, when cooked, restore a full wheel of stamina. This allows you to climb walls and towers you could not scale otherwise.

The only caveat is that some of the Lizalfos use Shock Arrows, which deal electric damage that bypasses your armor and can kill you in one hit early in the game. You can learn to dodge the electric attacks with practice, or you can protect yourself by eating food made with ingredients like Voltfin Trout or Zapshrooms that buffs your electric resistances before engaging them.

Speaking of food? Satori Mountain, just northwest of the Great Plateau starting area, is a great, efficient place to collect it.

This mountain has a huge grove of apple trees with lots of fruit; you can collect 100 apples in a single visit. Just cut down the trees or blow them up with your bombs to knock all the fruit to the ground. The trees respawn. Apples are a low-quality food but, if you cook five of them at once, you get a healing food that restores five hearts. Head to this area to fill your inventory with that potent item.

There’s also a grove of trees nearby with a fruit called Hearty Durian. Cooking a single one of these creates a meal that heals all your health and gives you four bonus hearts temporarily. Grab some before you leave.

And nearby, there is a glade full of herbs, including elemental resistance herbs that are generally pretty rare, and another glade full of useful mushrooms. There’s an image of the map above, and the locations of these areas are marked with cooking pot stamps.

Plants respawn on a pretty quick timer; it’s probably there for you to grab again if you have played for more than an hour since you last harvested all this stuff.

You will still need to find other spots to find foods that buff stats in quantity, but once you establish a fast-travel location at a shrine near this mountain, you are set for healing items.

THE BLOOD MOON IS A GREAT EXCUSE TO COOK

The Blood Moon is an occasional event that is just an excuse for the monsters you’ve killed to respawn, but it also improves all the food you cook when it’s active. The actual event occurs at midnight, game time, but the cooking buff becomes active at 11:30. You can see the red moon at 9:00, and that gives you a couple of minutes to get somewhere that you can take advantage of the event.

When you cook your standard five apple fruit meal during the blood moon, you get a healing food that restores 8 hearts instead of the normal 5, and your foods that buff stats cooked during this time will be more potent or last longer.

If you can, try to keep an eye on the sky whenever night falls while you are questing, and get to a cooking fire when the moon is red.

GET RICH OR DIE TRYING, USING MEAT

Skyrim and Fallout both have complex in-game economies involving dozens of vendors trading in huge selections of weapons, armor, ingredients and consumables, and those systems also interact with character stats.

All that complexity created opportunities for characters who leveraged those mechanics to gain tremendous power. A crafty merchant could obtain huge quantities of energy cores to fuel the power armor in Fallout 4, and players could leverage a profitable vendor shuffle to gear themselves out in insane crafted equipment and also to level up repeatedly in Skyrim.

Zelda’s economy is much simpler, which means there are aren’t nearly as many opportunities for exploitation. There are few vendors with limited inventory, and they take a long time to restock when you buy all their wares.

But you still need a bunch of rupees, the game’s currency. You need money to buy armor sets from shops, to pay the great fairies to unlock your armor upgrades and to buy specialty arrows whenever they’re in stock.

The thing you want to look for in any game where you interact with an economy is a commodity that you can easily collect in large amounts, but that sells to vendors for a lot of money. In Zelda, that commodity is meat.

If you follow the path by the shrine above Kakariko Village, past the first great fairy fountain, you’ll come to a field where Kass the bird-bard is playing his accordian. The area is full of deer you can slaughter — there’s actually a shrine quest here that involves trying to ride on one — and you can retrieve an item called Raw Prime Meat from their corpses.

A single deer will frequently drop two of these items, and if you cook three together with a couple of random lower-tier foods to push the heart-value of the final meal up a notch, you can sell the result for 150 rupees. Remember the location to harvest those apples? This is a good excuse to use even more of ‘em.

Apples are pretty easy to come by if you know where to look

Some players prefer to farm rupees by cheating at minigames, and once you’ve collected some extra hearts and powerful gear you can profitably farm the guardians near the castle. But hunting deer and cooking meat is about as lucrative and efficient as any other method of farming rupees, and you can do it very early in the game.

Buy the stealth suit in Kakariko Village and upgrade it to level two so you can stack that with a stealth potion to get close enough to throw your bombs at the deer. This way you don’t even have to use your arrows to kill them.

And while you can’t pet the dogs in this game, it is pretty amazing that you can beat an entire family of wolves to death with a club. It is also endlessly fun to chuck some explosives at a serene flock of majestic heron, and then scamper around collecting the ragged chunks of flesh and gristle that rain from the sky. There’s a reason this is one of the best-reviewed games of all time, so feel free to get creative with your meat harvest … but harvesting it is absolutely an easy path to those sweet, sweet rupees.

WHAT YOU’RE HUNTING FOR

The Climbing Gear set is awesome. Each piece gives you a speed boost when climbing, and you get a bonus reduction in the stamina cost to jump up the side of a wall if you upgrade it to level two.

This is fantastic, since Hyrule is full of mountains you’ll need to scale, and you must unlock your map by climbing Shiekah towers, frequently while under fire from dangerous enemies. You want this armor as early as you can get it.

The trouble is that the climbing shirt is in a chest in a “major” combat shrine, guarded by an extremely powerful robot miniboss who has an absurd amount of health and deals very high damage.

Later in the game, when you have access to powerful gear, he’s not too difficult to manage. In fact, once you’re geared up, you may want to farm him when he respawns for the powerful guardian weapons he drops. But he’s a beast early in the game.

So, if you hope to take him down and loot the gear before you’ve already climbed most of the stuff in the game without the benefit of the sweet climbing bonuses, you’ll need all those elemental arrows you bought with the rupees you got from selling meat, and the highest-tier defensive buff food you can cook during a blood moon to keep him from slicing you in half with his ridiculous axe.

Perhaps the ultimate prize is the Ancient Armor set — really the Iron Man armor set — which has the best defense rating in the game, reduces the damage you take from guardians and increases the damage you deal with ancient weapons. To get it, you have to journey to the Ancient Tech Lab at the far northeast corner of the map, and the set costs 6000 rupees.

Other armor sets, including the stealth suit you can get in Kakariko and sets that allow you to resist elemental damage, cost around 2,000 rupees each.

Powering that armor also requires unlocking a Great Fairy fountain for each of the four tiers of upgrades, and unlocking those fountains costs rupees: 100 for the first, 500 for the second, 1,000 for the third and 10,000 to unlock the final tier four upgrade.

That’s a lot of dead deer.

Arguably, that last 10,000 rupees is an unnecessary spend. Tier three armor is sufficient protection, especially with buffs from consumables, and in addition to the cost of unlocking the Tier 4 upgrades, actually upgrading your gear requires hunting down rare and esoteric items like dragon scales and fragments of falling stars.

Most players will complete the game without ever getting them, but if you spend the 10,000 rupees and hunt down nine star fragments and nine giant ancient cores, each piece of your Ancient Armor will have a defense rating of 28. With that much armor, you can take a Lynel axe to the face and barely notice it. The guardians’ death lasers will feel like tickle beams, and Calamity Ganon will seem more like Nuisance Ganon.

Is it gross overkill? Almost certainly. But let’s be real: you didn’t buy a brand new console at launch when it only has one game available for it because you are a subtle person.

HAVE FUN EXPLORING

The cool thing about open-world games is that you can go in any direction at any time and find something to do. Sometimes it will be something lucrative and surprising, like the orchard randomly placed on the side of the mountain. Other times, exploration will be less productive, but you’ll still chart a new part of the map, or at least pick some herbs while you run around. No matter how you play, over time, you’ll make progress.

But if you want to have a more concrete goal to work toward, hopefully you now know what you want, and have a better idea of how to get it. You can skip a lot of the difficulty in the early game by spending just a little time farming and grinding using these methods, and that can make the game a lot more fun.

First breath.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild beginner’s guide

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an enormous open-world game, which means two things: You can do pretty much whatever you want, and you'll be wondering what the heck you’re supposed to do.

In this guide, we'll help you figure that out — because the game often won't. Here, we’ll teach you the basics, a way to understand Breath of the Wild that you can learn in a few minutes and apply throughout your entire playthrough.

THE GREAT PLATEAU IS EVERYTHING

You begin The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Great Plateau, a geological skyscraper overlooking the vast Kingdom of Hyrule. There are mountains to climb, forests to plunder, creatures to defeat and dungeons to overcome. For the first few hours, you’ll be stuck here, in a microcosm the entire world.

Although you can't get down to explore the wider world, just about everything you do (and a lot of the stuff you may not even know you can do) serves as a prologue to the hours to come.

Just how to to make your way into Hyrule proper, we cover in our Great Plateau walkthrough. But don’t think of Breath of the Wild’s as something to motor through. The time you spend up here is immensely important. The skills and patterns you discover as you traverse the Great Plateau will be every bit as relevant dozens of hours later when you’re on the other side of the world.

Breath of the Wild doesn't tell you this, but eventually experience will. In the following sections, we’ll make the implicit explicit and offer some tips about how you should think about this version of Hyrule and your place in it.

EXPLORE, FIGHT AND COLLECT

In recent years, Nintendo began offering players a helping hand. Die a bunch in a Mario game, for example, and a game will offer you a power-up that makes beating the level easier. It's a philosophy centered on accessibility and helping everyone succeed without shame.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild feels like it was created at a different Nintendo.

To Zelda fans, Breath of the Wild will feel familiar and accessible, but its creators are far less concerned with holding your hand than they are with convincing you to experiment. The game rarely tells you where to go or what to do in detail. Instead, it prefers to wink and nudge, content to let you fill in the gaps. In Breath of the Wild, you may do what you wish as you wish.

Put differently, Breath of the Wild is full of clues and hints, not directions. And a shocking amount of the strategies you’ll use throughout the game appear in your first hours — even if you don’t realize it.

On the Great Plateau, you’re supposed to explore, fight and collect. Sixty hours later, you're also supposed to explore, fight and collect — to do what you’ve already done, just on a far grander scale. Don’t be in a hurry to leave. There’s plenty to learn and plenty of time to play.

How do you know what to explore, who to fight and what to collect? Mostly by using the logic that you learned in your first few hours. It all makes sense. You just have to remember simple things like how hot things protect you from the cold, how enemies have all the weapons you need — and that talking is a subtle but important part of exploration.

BE SOCIAL AND MAKE FRIENDS

In a game that doesn’t usually tell you what to do, the best way to figure out what’s next is to become chatty. Strike up conversations. Make friends.

Talk to everyone in Breath of the Wild. Many conversations will end in less than a minute, serving mostly as a way to make the world feel alive. Other conversations will give you hints about what to do next. It's hard to tell who’s going to be helpful and who’s just going to complain about the weather, so being talkative is the best course of action.

Worst case scenario, you can mash buttons and fly through conversations that go nowhere. Best case, you bump into the most helpful reoccurring characters in Breath of the Wild who give lost adventurers direction.

An early game example illustrates the reoccurring concept. After you complete one of the first main quests, you’ll exit a building without a clue about what comes next.

Just down some steps outside the door you exited, though, you’ll see a nondescript character. You’re free to talk to or ignore him. If you don’t talk to him — if you haven’t bothered being chatty, in other words — then you can just wander off and hope you stumble upon the plot. If you talk to him, you’ll discover that he’s really designed to give you clues about a mission — and not just here but throughout the game.

This is how Breath of the Wild works. It wants you to play detective, rather than tell you what to do next.

TALKING’S OTHER BENEFIT: SIDE QUESTS

The red exclamation point is a telltale sign of a side quest

Talking to NPCs also unlocks side quests — and it’s easy to spot the special characters who expand your game, too.

If you see a word bubble with a red exclamation point in its upper left corner, that’s Breath of the Wild telling you that there’s a quest here. The little guy in the image above has a whole backstory about his grandpa and a fascination of the weapons of Hyrule.

Like in any game, side quests are optional. You don’t have to unlock them, and even if you do, you don’t have to finish them. But they’re full of rewards large and small, and Nintendo peppered the Hyrule’s landscape with them. Talk to the folks. Learn what they want. Do what seems fun and leave the rest behind.

FIGHTING IS SIMPLE (AND ALSO SLIGHTLY MORE COMPLEX IF YOU WANT IT TO BE)

When you’re not shooting the breeze, you’ll be doing a lot of fighting. Combat in Breath of the Wild is straightforward, but there are a few things worth discussing.

First, combat is tough — surprisingly tough. It won’t take you long to run into an enemy who can clobber all three of your hearts away with one swing of his spiked club. Enemies can and will overwhelm you, so don’t assume that you’re more powerful than you really are.

When you do find yourself engaged in melee combat, it’s generally a good idea to target enemies with the ZL button, but it’s not always necessary. Even if you’re locked on, the camera angles can be confusing. When this happens, release ZL, move the right thumbstick in the direction of the enemy you want to hit, and swing away. Breath of the Wild tends to connect your weapon with the enemy, even though you’re not zeroed in.

When you’re using ranged weapons like the bow and arrow, headshots count. But keep in mind that they aren’t always definitive one-hit kills. The higher number (level, really) that your bow has, the more damage it will do. Some bows won’t have a high enough base damage to kill your target in one hit to the head, though. Some enemies have more health than you can drain with a single arrow, so don’t count on headshots for instant kills.

Also, give precision aiming with the Joy-Con motion controls a try. It may take a bit of getting used to, but Nintendo fine tuned the accuracy so that it’s a perfectly viable, quick way to aim just above a head and lock in your arrow’s arcing path to it target.

ADVANCED FIGHTING

A handful of advanced combat techniques require precise timing. Some repel attacks. Others allow you to unleash a flurry of uninterrupted counterattacks. They all look good, and they tend to destroy monsters, but they’re also super difficult to pull of — and they’re not strictly speaking necessary.

Here’s the thing: Even though you can kill just about everything with a few presses of a single button, these advanced techniques are always available. They’re always something you can do to improve your skills, and they can turn difficult enemies into easy kills, provided you can get the timing right.

Check out the video above from the Ta’Loh Naeg Shrine, which you can find in the outskirts of the Kakariko Village. It’ll show you how to do the following moves:

Side hop. Target your enemy with ZL, move left or right, press X to jump.
Backflip. Target your enemy with ZL, move away from your enemy, press X to jump.

Press Y to follow up side hop and backflip with a flurry rush, which lets you wack away several times at your enemy as time slows down.

Perfect guard. Target your enemy with ZL, press A to parry with your shield.
Charged attacks. Hold Y to build your power, then release to attack.

To reiterate, we’ve found none of these moves particularly easy to execute. We’ve put dozens and dozens of hours into Breath of the Wild, and we’re still far more likely to get hit while doing a backflip than we are to get a flurry rush. Still, there’s something appealing about them, and we keep trying.

ON WEAPONS, LOOT AND INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

We’re combining weapons, loot and inventory management into this section because they’re all parts of overlapping systems.

There may be more weapons in Breath of the Wild than every other Zelda game combined. (And if that’s not true, it sure feels like it). Point is, you’ll burn through enough weapons to make the Terminator jealous.

The upshot? Weapon proliferation means that you have to think a lot more about what you have, what you need and what you should use right now. If you’ve got a powerful weapon, don’t use it to bang rocks. Every swing is just one less that you’ll take against an enemy. In fact, it’s a great idea to carry a heavy, unwieldy weapon like a sledgehammer for occasions just like this. Save your clubs, spears and swords for fighting meat, not rocks.

Getting new weapons and loot is simple in concept and execution. Enemies carrying weapons will drop them when they die or when you wallop them. At that point, you can pick up the weapon and use it for yourself (or just steal it away from your enemy).

This makes weapon acquisition easy, too: If you need a weapon, murder monsters carrying weapons.

Of course, a game filled with weapon loot drops beings up an inevitable question: Should you pick up the weapon you just jarred loose? Usually, the answer is yes. You have several slots for weapons. Fill them. Your weapons will break. Don't get too attached to any weapon. You'll need backups, and you can always pitch stuff later.

Worst case, maybe you don't use what you picked up. No big deal. Or maybe it's there when your other weapons break, and at least you have something to fall back on.

A bokoblin drops his weapon, and Link prospers

You don't have to pick everything up, of course, and you can make the right call without touching anything. Each weapon in Breath of the Wild includes an arrow icon to the right of its name, denoting its attack power, relative to what you’re wielding at the moment.

If the arrow is green green and pointing up, then it's more powerful than the weapon you have equipped.
If it’s red and pointing down (like it is above), that means it's less powerful.
If it’s gray and pointing right, that means it's the same level as what you're holding.

A quick press of the plus button, and you can see your current arsenal. Every weapon has a number, denoting its power. And every time you pick a weapon up, it’ll show you your weapon’s number and the new weapon’s number right next to it. If you find something good, drop your worst weapon and pick up the new loot.

That's the bulk of the inventory management you'll do in Breath of the Wild: checking numbers against other numbers and swapping low for high.

There are tons of weapons and tons of weapon types in Breath of the Wild. Experiment, figure out what you like to use and stock up on those, whether they’re one-handed weapons like swords and clubs or two-handed weapons like spears and halberds. Build your own arsenal.

LEARN TO COOK

Breath of the Wild doesn’t go out of its way to explain its cooking system, which is weird, given how important it is.

You could wander upon the Old Man in your first hour or so, and he may tell you something opaque about cooking. Or you could miss this interaction all together and play for several hours before working it out on your own. Don’t do the latter. Start cooking as soon as you can.

There are two broad categories of things to cook in Breath of the Wild: food and elixirs. No matter what you’re making, it works the same way.

Approach a metal bowl. Light a fire underneath it if necessary. Press + to enter your inventory screen, and choose up to five ingredients to hold. Approach the bowl and, when prompted, press A to cook. It’s that simple.

Simple, yet mostly unexplained

COOKING FOOD

Apples are the simplest example of a cooked food’s benefit. Eating a raw apple restores a tiny amount of your health — half of one heart. Cooking an apple turns it into a baked apple, which restores a whole heart. Cooking two apples together creates simmered fruit, which restores two hearts but only takes up one inventory slot. The same holds true for the Hyrule herb. Eat it raw, and it’ll restore one heart. Cook it, and it’ll becomes fried wild greens, which restores two hearts.

This is the base benefit: Cooking makes items better, more potent, more effective.

It gets more complicated, and that’s where experimentation comes in. Much of what you pick up can spice up your meals. Raw meat will get you hearts in a pinch. But raw meat combined with herbs could regenerate your stamina, too. Or provide a defense or stealth boost.

COOKING ELIXIRS

Elixirs work like food, except that they’re liquid, and they have status effects. You need two things to make an elixir: a critter and a monster part.

Monster parts are everywhere. Every time you kill a monster, it drops a horn or a tooth or some other grotesque body part. Mix them with a critter — Breath of the Wild’s term for little creatures like frogs, fireflies and lizards — and you’ll create an elixir.

COOKING TIPS

Cooking is about experimentation. Don’t be afraid to throw a bunch of stuff in a bowl and see what happens. It might be a disaster, but you can always find more meat and apples.

That said, here are some general tips for cooking in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:

No matter what you’re cooking, make sure to read the item descriptions when you’re preparing your concoction. That’s how you’ll know if what you throw into the pot will boost your stealth or stamina or defense.
Food and monster ingredients don’t mix.
Don’t mix status effects. Whatever you make will only get one status effect, and you’ll wind up wasting the others if you mix them in.
If you cook something you like (or get something you like as a reward), navigate to the item in your menu and click on it to see the list of ingredients. The Switch’s one-button screenshot feature couldn’t be easier. Grab one and refer back to it if you want to make it again.
You can cook your way out of a difficult battle. You may not need better armor or more hearts. You may just need a heart meal that boosts your defense.
Cook with ferries. They provide an incredible boost to your meal.

SO WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO DO?

Some combination of “whatever the heck you want” and “find the thing that you’re looking for.” It’s really up to you.

We know that sounds like a non-answer, but it’s also the truth about a game designed to give its players an immense amount of freedom. No two playthroughs will be the same. Our Breath of the Wild is not your Breath of the Wild. They’re not supposed to be. We’ll all begin on the Great Plateau, but where we go from there is largely up to our whims.

With that in mind, here’s a few tips, which mostly amount to what we had to keep reminding ourselves as we played.

It's hard. You'll die. But that's OK because the penalty for death is minor backtracking.
It's confusing, but that's because it's an open world game. Worst case, you can just wander and examine whatever shiny thing you come across. And there are always more towers and shrines to discover.
Pick up items, even if you don't know what they're for. They're likely to become suddenly useful.
Talk to everyone. Those without useful information won't take up much of your time. Those with useful information will make you less confused.
If you don't know what to do, seek out towers and shrines.
If you find something that you know is important but you can't do it right now, put a sticker on your map. We like to mark the locations of rafts with a leaf and shrines we can’t complete with a star.
Assume that everything is there for a reason. If you walk out of a building, and there's a new character standing by the door who wants to talk to you, talk to them. That's Breath of the Wild gently nudging you in the right direction.
If you want to focus, use fast travel. There are an insane amount of distractions. That's also the beauty of the game. You can do what you want when you want to do it. But if you ever feel like you want to make progress, fast travel to wherever you want to go. It’s too easy to get distracted otherwise.