5 Tips For Surviving The Wilderness in Breath Of The Wild

Breath Of The Wild has surprised many with it's difficulty; as the wilderness is no place for those who aren't prepared to face it. So to help you out, heres some tips on how to stay safe when traversing Hyrule.

5 Tips For Surviving The Wild in Breath Of The Wild
Finding a way to survive the wilderness in The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild is a lot harder than you'd think. Nintendo certainly wasn't messing around when thinking about what challenges the players would need to face in order to save the land of Hyrule. After many deaths and learning how to tackle various challenges in Breath Of The Wild, here are 5 things that I learned that will help you survive the wild.

#1 – Cook As much as possible

As mentioned in my review of Breath Of The Wild, cooking is a very addictive. While you'll mostly be using dishes to regain health, you can also use it to gain certain boosts to your stats (such as defense, attack power, etc). This can help you tackle particularly difficult areas or take down a boss you find challenging.

Combining different ingredients will provide different effects aside from just healing you. Use that to your advantage (photo by Jake Thompson)
Food can also help you withstand extremely hot or cold temperatures. If you lack the specific armor that helps you with these extreme climates, cooking food that helps you for a limited time is the next best thing to do. Be sure to experiment with anything and everything that you can find, as you can look at the recipe you used to create that super useful dish later. 

#2 – Stock up on everything

Weapons, shields, and bows break often in Breath Of The Wild, so be sure to have more than one or two of them in your inventory when going out exploring or tackling a dungeon. It is also smart to stock up on a variety of arrows since many enemies and bosses have specific elemental weaknesses. You can also find weapons that have that have elemental attacks, but they can be quite rare to find.

Be sure to have plenty of weapons! You'll regret running out of them in a dangerous encounter... (photo by Jake Thompson)

You'll also want to have plenty of food with you. As mentioned before, food can help you in a variety of ways, so it's smart to cook food with a bunch of different effects to take with you if you plan on going away from a town and/or fire very long. You can also stock up on fairies that will revive you fairly early on in the game. There is a fairy fountain close to Kakariko Village that you can activate, which will allow you to collect several fairies that are flying around it.

You can also upgrade your Sheikah Slate to help locate cooking materials and even weapons that you want. This will help you locate things way faster if you need something to help you make a special dish or obtain a powerful weapon. 

#3 – Upgrade your armor/Find the great fairies asap

If you feel that enemies are able to do way too much damage to you, you're probably right. But how do you get past this issue? Well, it's quite simple: find the great fairies and get them to upgrade your armor! Think of them as armorsmiths from other RPGs: you collect the materials needed, and they can upgrade any armor that you have. The catch is that, in order to upgrade armor further and further, you'll need to find every great fairy scattered throughout Hyrule.

There are 4 great fairies in total. Finding them all lets you upgrade your armor more and more
Each Great Fairy operates in the same way, but there is no doubt that what they do is very useful. Upgrading your armor is the best way to ensure that enemies won't one shot you every time you try to fight them. It's also smart to upgrade the armor that protects you from things like extreme weather, since you'll probably wear that armor quite a bit, even in some boss battles (hint hint).

#4 – Find and activate the sheikah towers asap

One of the coolest new features in Breath Of The Wild is the Sheikah Towers. Think of them like eagle points in the Assassin's Creed series. By going to the top of one, you can activate it to get a full map of the area that you're in. This is an extremely useful tool as you'll be able to add details to your map instead of being in a blank blue canvas on your screen.

Not only will these towers upgrade your map, but you'll get a pretty nice view too

This may seem like an obvious thing to do for some, but you'd be surprised to know that many people actually prefer to play games like this with no map to help them. If you're that kind of player then just skip this, but the map in this game is extremely helpful in finding things for side quests that aren't marked, as well as finding the many different missing memories.

#5 – Be smart with enemy encounters

Alright alright, I know a lot of Zelda fans may be having trouble adjusting to Breath Of The Wild's combat system and enemy encounters; I know for sure I did. A lot of the more complicated, intricate moves that you could off in the previous entries are gone here. Enemies are significantly tougher and smarter as well. So how are you to survive running into a whole camp of these baddies? Well, aside from stocking up your weapons and upgrading your armor, there's several other things you can do to make these enemy hordes more manageable.

Battling multiple enemies at once is not a very good strategy in this game
Stealth is an extremely viable option in Breath Of The Wild. Link even can get special armor that upgrades his stealth immensely (probably one of the best armor sets in the game). If you successfully sneak up behind an enemy, you can perform a "sneak strike" that does double damage. You can also use your bow while sneaking to do extra damage; especially if it's a headshot.

Runes are also incredibly useful for taking out enemies. You'll find that a lot of enemy bases have big metal boxes in them. You can use your Magnises ability to pick up the box and drop it on enemies. This will do a bunch of damage, so be sure to use it when you can to conserve your weapons, bows, and arrows.

That's 5 tips that will help you survive the wilderness in Breath Of The Wild. Does this help you out some? What else is making it difficult to save Hyrule? Leave a comment down below! Special thanks to Jake Thompson for some of the screenshots.

If you wanna know my full thoughts on Breath Of The Wild, you can check out my full review here.

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