Breath Of The Wild’s Latest Big Glitch: Supercharged OP Weapons

A sequel may be on the horizon, but there’s still plenty of gameplay left in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Half a decade after its release, gamers are still finding new ways to crack Nintendo’s open-world RPG. Just this week, glitch hunters discovered what might be the most game-changing exploit yet: it’s now possible to rewrite weapon modifiers.

Released in 2017, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is arguably the crown jewel of the Nintendo Switch. Unlike many similar games, including previous Legend of Zelda entries and BotW’s own open-world contemporaries, the game gives you a toolkit and a playground and lets you go wild, with very little constraints.

This has spawned a highly collaborative community whose members have spent the past five years chasing glitches, designing exploits, and pushing the game to the brink, all while building on each other’s shared knowledge. (The largest shared information base is a massive code decompilation project led by Zelda’s reverse engineer Leoelitinowhich has spurred a host of new discoveries.) Over the years, gamers have learned to “jump to infinity”. They have open “impossible” chests. They even have figured out how to swipe on the map.

The particular problem depends on another method called inventory location transfer (IST). Discovered last month by BotW glitch-hunter zxrobin, IST allows you to move items between save files, meaning you can, for example, start a new game with some of the best weapons in the game. (WMT) takes things a step further, allowing you to imbue weapons in save files with staggering stat bonuses, all without modifying or hacking the game. However, you need to collect a bunch of items from kitchen. Here’s a quick look courtesy of BotW glitch-hunter El Duende 5:

Nintendo / El Duende 5

“This is probably going to be the most game-changing glitch ever,” one YouTube commenter said.

“They’re probably not wrong,” El Duende told Kotaku on Discord.

Some of the results to date have confirmed this claim. The players have created broadswords that turn into cyclones:

When upgraded, Link’s trusty Master Sword is virtually unstoppable, even do odd jobs high level enemies in Hyrule Castle:

Nintendo / El Duende 5

But El Duende says the arc of light is probably the most unstoppable weapon to upgrade, as it has infinite ammo and is unaffected by BotW notorious weapon durability feature.

El Duende says that a full tutorial for WMT is not yet available, as the BotW community has yet to iron out a few issues and discern a full understanding of the issue. But the basic steps are to force the IST exploit to apply the effects of Link’s culinary concoctions to the weapons in your key item slots.

“What happens with IST is that you can prevent the game from deleting a certain number of items from your inventory each time you load another file,” he said.

First, make sure you have 60 meals (the max under typical conditions) and two key items, and have negated any empty inventory slots between your meals tab and the specific item you want to improve. When you load your next save file, it will apply the effects of the meal to whatever item is in the last key item slot.

Players, including famous speedrunner Zelda Satougashi, are compiling “recipes” for weapons. One Endura Carrot plus four Raw Gourmet Meats grant a bonus to the durability of a shield. (Add this to the Hylian Shield to push its rating above 1160.) A mighty thistle and four raw gourmet meats, meanwhile, can add a scattering effect to your bows; here is a player who uses it to eliminate two guardian enemies with devastating powers with a single blow:

It’s a new technique, one that players are still trying to master, but it’s perhaps the ultimate in the broad canon of BotW glitching.

“There’s not much left to be desired,” said El Duende, pointing to the wide range of discoveries made in the game over the past five years. It’s hard to imagine what else could be there.

An untitled Breath of the Wild sequel is on the way, originally slated for this year but now slated for next year following a delay in March. Nintendo is keeping the game’s official name secret; Apparently, the subtitle is a kind of spoiler. Whatever its final name, BotW 2 doesn’t need to be much more than “more BotW” to earn critical acclaim and sell 80 billion copies, but it remains to be seen what effect its release might have on the most dedicated members of the BotW Community.

“I’m a little worried that Nintendo is looking at all of this and they’re going to tighten things up to the point of making the game less fun,” El Duende said. “But I also think whatever happens we will find other stuff like we did with the first game. It’s just a matter of time.”