So you’ve defeated the newest incarnation of Ganon and finished your first voyage through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. As the adrenaline from your encounter begins to wane, and you reflect on your journey as the credits roll, you are overcome by a sense of emptiness and longing. “What now?”, you say, as you try to pick up the pieces of your life and figure out how you can sustain the joy you’ve experienced for the past 50 - 70 hours.
Worry not, brave adventurer! Just because you’ve finished the main questline by no means implies that you don’t have plenty more exciting memories to make in this latest visit to Hyrule. Many, many hours of collecting, monster-hunting, documenting, and cartography await for players who aren’t ready to let go just yet, and especially those who are meticulous and aspire to say they’ve been everywhere and done everything.
10 Find All Of The Korok Seeds
To the immense joy of some and disdain for others, Korok Seeds are back, and now spread across a much larger version of Hyrule. Collectors who love scavenger-hunt type quests for things like flags and feathers in Assassin’s Creed, Dinosaur Bones in Red Dead Redemption 2, and other games that have you scouring every inch of the maps of those respective games, will find themselves right at home plundering every nook and cranny for these sometimes elusive trinkets.
One of the more controversial elements of Breath of the Wild was your reward for completing such a monumental quest. While you can continuously upgrade consumable item capacities with the Korok Seeds, players expected they would receive an incredible reward for their efforts. Unfortunately, the reward ended up being little more than bragging rights. Hopefully, Tears of the Kingdom will deliver on this.
9 Fill Out The Hyrule Compendium
Few things deliver a more consistent dopamine rush than watching all the entries in an in-game encyclopedia fill out gradually. The Hyrule Compendium enables just that kind of experience, and it returns in Tears of the Kingdom, utilizing one of its coolest new devices: the Purah Pad.
Not only is completing the Hyrule Compendium really satisfying, but it’s also a great way to ensure you’ve seen it all and aren’t in danger of any Tears of the Kingdom FOMO. Like the Korok Seeds, however, the reward for completing the compendium in Breath of the Wild was little more than an in-game trophy—we’ll let you know if Tears of the Kingdom is different when we find everything.
8 Wrap Up Side Quests
Just as in Breath of the Wild, you can practically make your way to the endgame the moment you clear the tutorial in Tears of the Kingdom—the game will last as long as you want. But, of course, this is not how the Nintendo Switch generation of Zelda games are meant to be played. The real meat of the open-world entries is taking on quests that’ll send you far and wide across the vast and varied ecosystems of the game’s fabulous world.
Many quests involve gathering collectibles and other long-term processes that will span the length of pretty much the entire game, and with Hyrule being as huge as it is, there’s a good chance you’ll have some lingering quests to grind out in the postgame.
7 Improve Your Photography Skills
When interacting with an NPC called Josha, you’ll take on a quest called “Camera Work in the Depths”. After completing this quest, you’ll have access to the camera on your Purah Pad.
Hyrule is a beautifully constructed environment full of scenic locations and with the potential for lots of unique and memorable moments—get out there and step up your photography game by capturing them and sharing your art-within-art with the community.
6 Make Link Overpowered
There are lots of tough battles and physical obstacles out there in Tears of the Kingdom—and many players will save some of these for the postgame. Give yourself a leg-up on some of these challenges by beefing Link up by gathering as many Heart Containers and Stamina Vessels as possible.
You can increase your health and stamina by using Lights of Blessing at the various statues spread throughout the game, and they’re found at the end of the game’s many Shrines. Keep in mind, you will only have enough Lights of Blessing to max out either your hearts or your stamina: not both.
5 Become A Master Equestrian
While Link is once again starting with a clean slate, having lost all his power-ups and abilities from Breath of the Wild, one thing that does carry over from Breath of the Wild are your horses. That said, there’s no reason to turn a blind eye to some of the new horses available in Tears of the Kingdom.
Throughout Hyrule, you’ll find the Giant White Stallion, the Skeletal Horse, a Golden Horse, and, of course, the triumphant return of Epona. Any of these horses will make a fine addition to your stable, and will make long-distance treks across the landscape a lot more enjoyable.
4 Hunt Down Elite Monsters
While you’ll naturally take out the game’s more infamous bosses during the main quest, Tears of the Kingdom is still full of overworld bosses that will present confrontations which you can take more improvised and player-specific approaches to defeating, especially with the capabilities of the new Zonai Devices.
Spread throughout Hyrule, you’ll encounter Taluses, Gleeoks, Moldugas, and enemy Constructs that you can engage in straight-up mecha battles with. You’ve spent dozens—if not hundreds—of hours accumulating skills, collectibles, upgrades, and weapons: where better to use them than on some of the game’s toughest denizens?
3 Conquer Every Shrine
There are a whopping 152 Shrines in Tears of the Kingdom—32 more than there were in Breath of the Wild. You’ll find 120 of these mini-dungeons on the Hyrule map, and 32 in the new sky islands, and luckily for us, they're a lot easier to find this time around.
Answering the call of every Shrine in Tears of the Kingdom is a huge undertaking, and if you’re pressed to focus on the main story quest line, you can happily save them for the postgame. Keep in mind that Shrines are where you get Lights of Blessing, which are required for increase your health and stamina, so don’t put too many of them on the back burner.
2 Explore Every Inch Of The Map
Nintendo has truly outdone themselves and created an absolutely dense, sprawling world for you to explore—and explore you should. Once you beat the main quest and reload your now starred save file, you’ll notice that your map of Hyrule now has a completion percentage.
This is far and away the most daunting task one can complete in such a boundless game, but the experience is absolutely rewarding, both in terms of the rewards you’ll receive and the satisfaction that comes from knowing you’ve truly plumbed the depths of the game.
1 Experiment With Zonai Devices
In the coming weeks, months, and even years, when you’ve played the game enough that the novelty of the story and all the twists and turns therein has worn off, and you know the new Hyrule like your own backyard, experimenting with the Zonai Devices will be the element of Tears of the Kingdom driving the most longevity and community engagement.
When Breath of the Wild came out in 2017, the world watched as streamers, speedrunners, and even more casual gamers alike found unique and innovative ways to utilize the abilities in the game to fast travel, defeat enemies in absurd ways, and outright break the game, and the Zonai devices take that playful sandbox idea and inject it with infinitely more possibilities that are just teeming to be discovered by you.