During Tears of the Kingdom’s tutorial on the Great Sky Island, you meet a Forge Construct and learn about the foundry, where you can trade Zonaite for Zonai Charges and Crystallized Charges. At the time, I didn’t really understand what any of that stuff was. I decided I’d figure it out later, and got back to my adventure. I spent the next ten hours seeing the sights across Hyrule, and completely forgot about the foundry. I was only reminded of it when I started seeing the amazing machines everyone was building with Ultrahand, and I realized I need more battery charges if I’m ever going to construct my own flamethrowing bomb-dropping flying machine with laser guided missiles. I didn’t realize it back then, but meeting that Forge Construct on the Great Sky Island was the beginning of one of the most demanding resource grinds I’ve ever seen.
To increase the amount of charge on your Energy Cell, you need a lot of Zonaite. You can find Zonaite all over the Depths, so if you intend to operate any Zonai machines for more than a few seconds, you’re going to be spending an extraordinary amount of time wandering around in the dark looking for Zonaite deposits to smash open. The process for upgrading your Energy Cell is overcomplicated and confusing, but here are the bullet points:
- Collect Zonaite while exploring the Depths
- Trade Zonaite for Crystallized Charges at a foundry at a rate of 3:1
- Trade Crystallized Charges for Energy Wells at a Crystal Refinery at rate of 100:1
- Buy three Energy Wells to create one full battery charge on your Energy Cell
If you don’t want to do the math, that’s 900 Zonaite per upgrade. To put that into perspective, a single node drops two or three Zonaite, and you’ll typically find nodes in clusters of four or five. More math, that’s 60 clusters for every upgrade, assuming maximum yield from every node, and maximum nodes in each cluster. Those people you’ve seen with ten battery charges have spent more time farming Zonaite than most people will spend playing Tears of the Kingdom from beginning to end.
The process is so needlessly complicated too. Not only are the Crystallized Charge vendors and Energy Well vendors separate, but there’s a limit to the amount of charges you can buy at once. The foundry on the Great Sky Island only sells ten at a time, while the others can sell up to 30. If you want to turbo farm Zonaite and turn it all in at once, you’ll have to find all the foundries in the world and travel between them to buy up all their stock, then wait an arbitrary amount of time before you can buy more. Right now I’ve got over a thousand Zonaite to spend and I’m just waiting for all the Forge Constructs to refill their stock. I want to be soaring through the clouds on a rocket-powered bicycle, not rooting around in the Underdark and killing time until I'm allowed to spend my hard-earned resources.
I'm not anti-grind by any measure. I've dumped thousands of hours in Ark, and the vast majority of my time there was spent hitting metal nodes with a pick ax. I like farming crafting materials and making incremental progress towards a big goal. It would be one thing if I was farming Zonaite for actual materials to build something, but funneling all of that work into a single aspect of character progression feels off. This is just a convoluted system for grinding XP to upgrade my Link's battery stat, and it's a grind that's grinding me to dust.
Open world games always have optional time sinks for players that want some long term to work towards, but Tears of the Kingdom has plenty of that even without the Zonaite grind. Breath of the Wild proved that people would devote thousands of hours to a game that gave them freedom to experiment and create, and Tears of the Kingdom leaned into the aspects even more with Ultrahand. People are going to be playing this game for the next decade because it gives them infinite opportunities to create their own fun.
Even if you're not motivated by its creative features, there's still 152 Shrines to complete, 900 Korok seeds to find, 58 wells, 400 caves with 400 Bubbul Frogs, and countless secrets to uncover throughout Hyrule. The Zonaite grind is a layer of padding that Tears of the Kingdom didn’t need, and it's a frustratingly large barrier that's blocking me from the thing that I really want to do, which is to commit airborne war crimes against the Zora. Those fishy freaks will feel my explosive wrath one day, if I don’t die of black lung from working the mines first.