One of the things I really enjoyed about Breath of the Wild was the myriad of outfits one can get from scanning amiibo. Thankfully, you don’t need amiibo in Tears of the Kingdom to get those same outfits since they are now embedded in base game by way of treasure chests giving everyone access without requiring the use of any amiibo (or NFC tags) to do so. Collecting was one thing, but upgrading each of the armor pieces was another. A lot of them require Star Fragments and they are one of the rarest drops in the game. It is the number one bottleneck to upgrades and requires a lot of patience and/or luck to get even just one.
There were three ways to get them in BotW: farming White Lynels, scanning some amiibo, or running to where a falling star hit the ground. The first method was the more time consuming and a bit resource intensive. Lynels hit hard and if you aren’t prepared you’ll be burning through food, weapons, and shields in no time. Plus, there were only a handful of White Lynels in Hyrule and once they were all taken care of, you’d have to wait for the next blood moon for them to respawn. Add to that the low drop rate of Star Fragments, farming Lynels wasn’t always productive.
The second method also had abysmal drop rates. The amiibo that dropped them were certain Zelda ones and Ganondorf from Super Smash Bros. And since amiibo can only be scanned once per day, you’d have to scrub your system clock over and over again to keep scanning in hope that you might get one.
The third method involved keeping track of the in-game moon cycles. Towards the end of last month, I really wanted to upgrade all my armors to the max. So I wondered if there was an efficient way to get Star Fragments. I ran across this post on reddit that describes how to keep track of the moon cycles and the best place to be to spot a falling star. It worked but despite what the title says, it took more than 5-7 minutes per star. I only got handful before calling it quits because it was tedious as hell.
Now, in TotK, Star Fragments are still in the game. And while I have yet to unlock the Great Fairies, I am assuming the upgrade path for the armor pieces is exactly the same where the Great Fairies will require certain materials such a bugs, herbs, gemstones, and, of course, Star Fragments. Why else would they be in the game? I haven’t really thought far enough ahead to see if the moon guy was still near the Dueling Peaks Stable. I assume he is but that doesn’t matter, because I randomly came across this infinite item glitch that makes farming Star Fragments a no-brainer and began duplicating in earnest.
If you can’t be bothered to click through I’ll briefly describe the method here:
- Jump off something high enough so you can glide. A tree will work just fine.
- Pull out the paraglider.
- Hit + to go to inventory.
- Select a Materials item to hold. Hold 5 of them.
- Press Y+B at the same time. This will sort your inventory and close the screen.
- Press + again immediately afterward. If you pressed Y+B correctly, the item you selected in step 4 will have the original amount before you selected it.
- Repeat steps 4-6 three more times before hitting the ground.
I’ve found that you can only glitch 20 items. Any more than that the system starts despawning some on-screen items and you won’t get all of them. So don’t go falling off Dueling Peaks hoping to get 500 items by the time you hit the ground.
You can do this with fairies. Just start the process close to the ground and you can only do steps 4-6 twice for a maximum of 10 fairies to try and grab before they fly away. I may or may not have gotten hundreds of fairies this way.
You can do this with Bomb Flowers as well, but I would follow the same near-the-ground approach a fairies so the bombs don’t explode from the impact of hitting the ground.
Look, let me set the record straight in that I don’t like using cheat codes or glitches or hacks in any of the video games that I play, ever. Remember Game Genie when that was a thing? It was for losers. I like playing games the way they are presented and intended. I like playing games in hard mode. But if Nintendo is going to insist that fully upgrading an armor set is going to require Star Fragments, again I might add, then I have no problems this time speeding up the process. They’ve stuck to their guns on a lot of game play mechanics, good and bad, from BotW and carried them over to TotK. I don’t want to feel like I’m stuck in the same ruts all over again and if I can make one of those things a bit easier, then I have no problems doing that. I’ve been fortunate enough to get a handful of Fragments all by luck before discovering this method. I’ve maxed out at 999 Fragments saving countless hours of my time tracking falling stars, killing Lynels, and scrubbing the system’s calendar just to scan amiibo.
Using this infinite item glitch is basically unlocking Easy mode. Need rupees? Duplicate Diamonds to your heart’s content. Need to light up the underground? Get as many Giant Brightbloom plants as you want. Ancient Blades, Star Fragments, Sundelions, Big Hearty Truffles, anything is fair game. Fair game, that is, until Nintendo decides to patch this glitch out. If you’re like me and don’t like cheating, I can respect that. I am like that too but like most rules there are exceptions. And I am okay with this being one of them. The idea of using a hack/glitch/cheat normally makes me ill but the whole Star Fragment requirement from BotW armor upgrades left a bad taste in my mouth. This glitch is just a palate cleanser.
Update: This list of materials required for TotK armor upgrades is gonna help soooo much.
