Tears Of The Kingdom: How To Find Pristine Weapons

If you're trying to find or farm Pristine Weapons in Tears of the Kingdom, this guide can help you.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an excellent example of subverted expectations. It might look like a Breath of the Wild DLC at first glance, but it changes the world of Hyrule so drastically that anyone who has played more than an hour of the game will tell you this is a completely new experience.

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Gloom is a massive factor in what completely changes the game world's landscape. In particular, decayed weapons are a direct result of Gloom and its corrosive nature, sharply reducing weapon damage and durability. Luckily, you can still find non-decayed, Pristine weapons if you know where to look.

In Tears of the Kingdom, almost every weapon you obtain will be a "decayed" variant of a normal weapon from Breath of the Wild. The in-game explanation is that the Gloom that has risen from the Depths has had a decaying effect on every weapon in Hyrule. Decayed weapons not only do significantly less damage but also break much more quickly. So where do you find Pristine Weapons that don't have their stats significantly reduced by the ever-present Gloom? Surprisingly, in the Depths.

If you've been regularly exploring the Depths, you will have come across some curiously shaped stone pillars with a shadowy figure standing on top of them. These are Shadow Soldiers, a renewable source of Pristine, non-decayed weapons. If you take the Pristine weapon they're holding, they'll disappear. But after every Blood Moon , they will reappear holding a new Pristine weapon.

Initially, it's easy to overlook their value since they only tend to hold Traveler Swords, Claymores, or Spears, which are not significantly better than their decayed variants. But as you progress through the game, Shadow Soldiers gain access to better weapons like Gerudo, Forest, and Royal variants. The disparity between these stronger weapons and their decayed version is also much higher, making searching for them worth it.

There are three types of weapons in Tears of the Kingdom: One-handed weapons, two-handed weapons, and Spears, and every Shadow Soldier is locked into one type of weapon. So if a Shadow Soldier gives you a one-handed sword the first time you come across it, it will always have a one-handed weapon to give you after a new blood moon. This means that if you're looking for a strong two-handed weapon, you can mark the location of a stone pillar where you found a pristine two-handed weapon before and return to it after a blood moon. The Shadow Soldier will always be holding another pristine two-handed weapon.

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If you're willing to spend some time, you can get a Soldier to reliably spawn the exact variant of the pristine weapon you want with the exact buff you want. Here's what you have to do:

If you're getting the exact same weapon every time, it means you made the hard save too late, and the Shadow Soldier was already locked into whatever weapon he was holding. Go back to the earlier save and make a hard save at a farther distance from the soldier and repeat.

If you're searching for a non-basic weapon (Gerudo, Royal, Goron, etc.), you will first need to have encountered the weapon in its decayed state and have used it until it broke for it to spawn in the hands of a Shadow Soldier.

The stone pillars that Shadow Soldiers spawn on have a very distinct shape that can be easily identified by just looking at the map. Here's how:

You don't have to mark every pillar you come across, but having 20-30 pillars marked means you have plenty of options to farm every Blood Moon. And the good thing about this is that you will only have to do this once. Happy hunting!

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Hamza Haq is a firm believer in Keyboard/Mouse supremacy and will play Tekken with WASD if you let him. As a List Writer at DualShockers, Dota 2, Pokémon, and Elden Ring is his gaming trifecta, but he's never one to turn down a 3rd person action RPG if it catches his interest. When he's not bent over a keyboard, he's reading fantasy novels, discovering obscure podcasts, experimenting with home-brewed coffee concoctions, and trying to convince his dad that his career is, in fact, a real job.