What is the Blood Moon in Zelda: Tears of Kingdom? Tricks, Options, How to Restart

The reappearance of enemies and resources is a mechanic that every open-world game has to prevent the player from running out of anything to fight against or to collect in their games, since no matter how long they are, eventually there will be no more hostile NPCs to kill to farm its resources, minerals to craft with, food to collect, etc.

In Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom this reset mechanic is “camouflaged” in the Blood Moon, which every time it appears causes all monsters we’ve defeated and resources we’ve collected to regenerate (except bosses and a few other sequences, plus some unique items). But what if we told you that there is a way to make Blood Moon come out whenever you want? In this guide, we explain how.

What is the Blood Moon in Zelda?

As Raquel Cervantes explained to us in her guide on How to take advantage of the Blood Moon to make our recipes more powerful, the Blood Moon is a phenomenon that occurs every seven days in the game, and that serves as a reset for all enemies and resources that Link has defeated to prevent Hyrule from eventually becoming empty after several hours of play.

Even if we play in a very passive way, the game will always generate a Blood Moon when it sees that we have defeated a certain number of hostile NPCs, collected apples from various trees, and insects for our elixirs, or bought all the stocks of some store.

Also Read: Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom key Features, Map, Full Guide & More

And although it is something that helps us never run out of stocks of certain enemies (such as the Centaleons, from whom the best ingredients for our potions and elixirs are obtained, or the most powerful and multi-shot bows ), it would be nice to have the ability to ”summon” the Blood Moon to take advantage of its benefits when cooking or to make enemies from an area that we know leave good drops reappear. Well, it turns out it’s possible.

How to restart the Blood Moon whenever we want

To perform this “ritual” that will allow us to make the Earth’s satellite appear red, we need to meet three conditions:

Have a multi-shot bow (it does not matter if it is 3 or 5 arrows), so that it is easier for it to take effect

Have a certain amount of stamina (or replenish it during shooting with elixirs or food)

Need to have a good amount of opals

Being near a destructible rock formation (the kind that we can break with our weapons. With a Bomb arrow or with the Power of the Fire Sage)

If you don’t know where there might be such rocks, there are several mounds all over Hyrule, in any case, a possible location is right next to Hyrule Castle, or there is also a viable one underground, near Skull Lake. You could also try it in the Sahasra Hill Watchtower cave. The thing is, they have to be destructive rocks.

Two possible locations in which to perform the glitch.

The procedure is the same regardless of the location and is as follows. We have to jump from a certain height to activate the slow shot technique. While we are in the air, we attach an opal to our bow and start shooting at the pile of rocks (conveniently, we do it near and not far from the pile); We continue shooting opals and arrows without leaving the slow firing.

The water effect of our arrows fired so often will start to slow down the game. You have to keep shooting until it looks like the game is going to hang on you. The Gamers will know this because the number of images per second will drop to a few frames (less than 10 even).

And as incredible as it may seem when the animation ends (you touch the ground or you exit the slow shot) the Blood Moon will make an appearance, even if it is noon.

Why does the Blood Moon rise with this trick?

The explanation for this trick is curious and we find it in a limitation of the game’s memory. In Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom the Blood Moon serves as we have already said to regenerate the monsters that we have eliminated and the objects that we have collected. By default, the game makes it happen every seven days in-game, but surely not seven nights have passed and you already had the red moon in the night sky again.

The reason is that the memory of the game code stores all the actions that Link performs (or objects in general, hence we can use Backspace with any object and it moves even if we didn’t see it do it originally) is reaching its limit and counts from enemies killed to resources collected.

Every ”seven days” the game resets that memory space to reactivate all the NPCs and resources that Link has consumed, and free up the space needed to start the cycle over. But if we force the game’s memory as it happens with this trick, the program detects that it is getting too low and will activate the Blood Moon to free the memory of the game and restart the buffer in which the enemies and resources are stored.