COVID has been a weird time. Periods of absolute idleness. Periods of overexertion. Days or weeks of not seeing or communicating with others. Many people took the opportunity of free time and isolation to replay their favorite games. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is surprisingly replayable, after all; a massive map is populated with endless surprises, puzzles, hidden items, and generally fun little things you might notice and enjoy if you take the time to look for them. Some of those surprises, however, can be a bit daunting if you’re a completionist type, like the collectible korok seeds. Keep reading to find out how to find all 900 koroks in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
What are Koroks?
Breath of the Wild’s map, which has been estimated to be as little as 50 square miles and as much as three times that depending on the source, is obviously massive. A player could easily spend hundreds of hours exploring it, and many have. One of it’s many hidden treasures are the 900 koroks littering the map, everywhere from plainly visible mini puzzles involving moving a rock to much, much more complicated puzzles involving… moving a rock.
Koroks are small mythical creatures in leaf masks that can be found anywhere from in a tree easily spotted on the main path of the primary game’s story to tucked deep into an area a casual player will never explore. Essentially, if you see something that looks difficult to get to and unique visually that might inspire you to check it out when you have the ability, there is very likely a korok there to be discovered. However, with 900 of them, it’s almost certain the developers didn’t intend for the average player to find them all. Doing so would take extensive time commitment, involved understanding of how the koroks are hidden, and almost certainly a map of some kind that identifies the harder to find locations when you’ve met 875/900 and have run out of ideas. Luckily, thanks to a global pandemic and internet access, many players had all three.
Why Bother?
But why, you ask? Why would any sane, rational adult decide to dedicate that amount of time to something ultimately without reward? Spoilers for those who haven’t attempted or searched the results of finding all the korok seeds, after about halfway through finding all of the koroks, Hestu, the maraca wielding big korok that rewards you for finding his friends by increasing your weapon and shield capacity, stops giving you anything for your effort. Upon finding the 900th korok, he will reward you with a gold statue that strongly resembles poop and, apparently, smells like it. So why bother? Well, because you can. Many players are completionists, and the Koroks are one of the largest sections of 100% the game outside of the main story. Beyond that, it’s simply nice to spend more time in Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule. The ability to see a range of environments, find and catch an assortment of wildlife and resources, and engage with different characters is something many don’t have the ability to do right now.
How To Find Them and Keep Your Sanity
The first few hundred koroks are surprisingly easy, especially on a second or third playthrough where you know what to look for as you go. Plenty of them wind up visible on your primary gameplay route to unlock all of the towers, visit each village, and defeat the four blights controlling the divine beasts. If you keep your eye out, you’ll get a pretty good number of koroks just taking the time to stop and smell the roses, or more accurately, move some rocks, shoot some fruit, you get the idea.
Once you have the complete map visible, you can also zoom in all the way and see where the koroks you have already found are. This makes it much easier to determine where you should be looking closer and where you may have largely explored already. It’ll also keep you occupied for hours, and you’ll be seeing places you’ve walked through or flown over in a new way, engaging with the map’s countless nooks and fine details. And this map is absolutely detailed; this isn’t a game that populated a dull repetition of terrain to give you more area to cover in gameplay. The map, almost moreso than the games main story, and how you can interact with it are what keep players coming back to the game years after initially beating it.
Several hundred koroks in, possibly close to the goal of all 900, every player will run into the same issue: there are still more koroks. How? How can there be more koroks. You have searched every section of the map, you have paced and ridden horses and glided over and taken a magical motorcycle through every last part of the map, but you’re still not at 900. You will need to pull up a map and check every tiny segment. Many choose to use an interactive map where players could find every korok listed with details and uncheck those they found. Is it cheating? Well yeah, I guess. However, I have to guess that only a handful of people, if that, found all of their koroks organically. It is just too many on too expansive of a map.
And then you do it. You catch em all. You collect every korok. Modern man was not supposed to fly this high. Turn it in for your weird, gold spiral of smelly soft serve and finish your game. You win. You deserve it. But what was the point? You have partaken in every little bit of the game that developers took the time to design. With a game this beautiful and enjoyable, it feels like a world that deserves that level of engagement and examination. But now what do you play?
Charles House is a photojournalist, guitarist, and general nerd from Washington, DC.
