A Link to the Past Small Keys: All 61, Dungeon by Dungeon

Palace of Darkness puts all six of its small keys in treasure chests. Desert Palace puts none of its four in a chest at all — three are under pots, and the fourth is balanced on top of a torch where you have to knock it down with the Pegasus Boots.

That gap is why people get stuck in this game. You stand in front of a locked door, count the chests you have opened, count the doors you have unlocked, and conclude the game ate a key. It did not. More than half the keys in A Link to the Past were never in a chest to begin with.

Here is the count for all thirteen keyed dungeons, and where the ones you cannot find are hiding.

The 61 keys, dungeon by dungeon

Two independent sources land on the same total. Zelda Wiki's Small Key article lists a per-dungeon count for A Link to the Past, and the Archipelago randomizer's ALttP world declares a small-key pool per dungeon in code. Both add up to 61 small keys, and they agree on every dungeon from Eastern Palace onward.

Five dungeons carry six keys each — Palace of Darkness, Swamp Palace, Ice Palace, Misery Mire and Turtle Rock. Ganon's Tower carries eight, the most in the game, and a full clear does not have to spend them all — Zelda Central's route through the tower reaches Agahnim on six.

At the other end, Tower of Hera has exactly one, and it is not in a chest either.

The only place the two sources disagree is how they split the castle. Zelda Wiki files six keys under Hyrule Castle and two under a second castle entry; the randomizer data puts four in the escape sequence and four in Castle Tower. Both arrangements come to eight, and the speedrunning wiki's route names all four escape keys individually: two castle guards, the chest past the snakes, and the Key Rat in the sewers. Zelda Wiki's ALttP table is tagged as a stub on the page itself.

Only 26 of the 61 sit in a chest

This is the number worth carrying around. Thirty-five of the 61 keys are not in a treasure chest. They are under pots, held by enemies that die and drop them, sitting on top of a torch, or standing loose in a cage.

The randomizer data that models the original game lists 32 of these individually, each with the ROM address the vanilla game stores it at. Three more are non-chest pickups of a different shape: the Desert Palace torch key, the Tower of Hera basement key, and the Ganon's Tower torch key, all confirmed in walkthrough routes.

Three dungeons hide zero keys in chests:

• Eastern Palace (2 keys) — one under a pot in the dark room, one dropped by an Eyegore in the dark hall.
• Desert Palace (4 keys) — three under pots, one on a torch.
• Tower of Hera (1 key) — sitting inside the Mini Moldorm's pen in the basement. You lift it out over the barrier with the Boomerang.

And exactly one dungeon does the opposite. Palace of Darkness is the only dungeon whose entire key supply is in chests — all six of them.

That enemies can carry keys is a property of the sprite itself, not a scripted event. Each sprite has a byte that decides what it leaves behind when it dies: one value leaves an ordinary key, and another leaves the Big Key. A key-carrying enemy skips its normal loot table entirely — the mechanic our enemy drops guide covers from the loot side.

Where the other 35 keys hide

Dungeon by dungeon, here is what you are looking for when the chests have run out.

Swamp Palace is the standout. Five of its six keys are under pots, which is a nasty combination with a dungeon whose whole gimmick is raising and lowering water to reach rooms you have already been through. If Swamp Palace has stalled, the answer is almost never a chest you missed.

Turtle Rock's two are both Pokeys, and Ganon's Tower's fifth is the Mini Helmasaur standing between you and the Moldorm climb — an enemy our enemy guide already flags as needing something other than a sword, because the mask eats sword hits.

The compass does not find keys in this game

Worth knowing before you spend an hour backtracking. In A Link to the Past, the Compass does exactly one job: it shows which floor and which room the dungeon's boss is in. It does not mark treasure chests, and it does not chime when you walk into a room with a hidden key.

That chime is a real Zelda feature — it is just not this game's. Link's Awakening gives the Compass a tone that plays whenever Link enters a room containing a hidden Small Key. A Link to the Past came first and gives you the boss location, full stop.

So there is no in-game tool that will point you at a pot key. The dungeon map shows you rooms you have not visited; the compass shows you where the fight is. Everything else is lifting things.

Keys are locked to one dungeon, one byte each

The game does not track "your keys". It tracks this dungeon's keys.

The save file has a single byte holding the number of keys you have in the dungeon you are currently standing in, and a separate row of bytes holding the keys earned in each dungeon individually — fourteen named entries running from the Sewer Passage through Ganon's Tower, plus two more the disassembly notes mark as probably unused. When a dungeon loads, the HUD routine writes that dungeon's key count into the live counter; in a room with no key system at all it writes a value that the display code reads as "draw nothing", which is why the key icon disappears on the overworld.

Two practical consequences fall out of that:

• Keys picked up outside a dungeon do nothing. The disassembly's own SRAM notes say it plainly: you can earn keys on the overworld, and they will not open anything.
• A spare key in one dungeon is not a spare key anywhere else. There is no shared pool. Walking out of Skull Woods holding an unused key does not help you in Ice Palace.

The ROM's internal dungeon names are a small treat if you go looking: Palace of Darkness is filed as "Dark Palace", Thieves' Town as "Gargoyle's Domain", and Castle Tower as "Hyrule Castle 2". Those names are also how you can tell what the game thinks each area is — which matters for the next section.

If you want to see what happens when all of that gets deliberately unpicked, keysanity in ALTTPR throws every small key into the global item pool, so a Turtle Rock key can be sitting in a Light World chest.

Big keys, maps and compasses: what each dungeon carries

The save file stores the Compass, Big Key and Dungeon Map as three bitfields laid out the same way, one bit per dungeon — and several of those bits are marked in the disassembly notes as belonging to a dungeon that never got the item.

Castle Tower is the odd one out — it has none of the three. Four small keys, no big key, no map, no compass, no big chest and no Heart Container. It is a staircase with Agahnim on top, which is why our dungeon order guide treats it as an interlude rather than a dungeon.

Hyrule Castle is the other exception: it has a map and a Big Key, but the compass bit for it is one of the ones the notes mark as unused. There is no compass in the castle because there is no boss to point at.

For where each of those dungeons sits in the run, and what item gets you through its door, the dungeon order guide has the full chain. Everything else we have written is on the A Link to the Past coverage hub.

Quick Action Checklist

• Lift every pot before you decide a key is missing. Nineteen of the game's small keys are under one.
• Do not trust the compass to find keys. In this game it only shows which floor and room the boss is on.
• Eastern Palace, Desert Palace and Tower of Hera hide no keys in chests at all — pots, a torch, and a basement cage.
• In Swamp Palace, check pots first. Five of its six keys are under one.
• In Ice Palace, kill the Pengator in the second room and the blue Bari in the Babusu room — both are carrying keys.
• Bring the Pegasus Boots to Desert Palace and Ganon's Tower. Each has a key sitting on a torch that a dash knocks loose.
• Bring the Magic Hammer into Ice Palace for the key under the mole-peg rock, and the Boomerang into Tower of Hera for the caged one.
• Do not hoard keys between dungeons. Each dungeon has its own counter; a leftover key stays behind.
• Ganon's Tower holds eight, the most of any dungeon — three in chests, three under pots, one on the Mini Helmasaur, one on a torch.