ALTTPR Retro Mode: Rupee Arrows, Keys and Take-Any Caves

Every arrow in Retro has a price. A wooden one costs 10 rupees to fire, a silver one costs 50, and neither leaves the string until you have paid 80 rupees for a quiver in a shop. Small keys stop belonging to any one dungeon and start turning up on store shelves at 100 apiece. Five caves that normally hold no item now hold an old man and a free gift.

That is Retro, the A Link to the Past Randomizer's throwback to the original Legend of Zelda, which is how the options page on alttpr.com pitches it. Our ALTTPR beginner guide gives it one line, the same single line it gave Inverted before that mode got its own guide. This is the rest of it.

The sources are the same kind the Inverted guide used. One is alttpr.com: the options page and the update notes. The other is code: the generator's source on GitHub, which decides what a seed contains and what its logic assumes, and the base ROM patch it applies, which is where the arrow prices live. The options page and the code disagree once, about the quiver, and that is flagged below where it comes up. Numbers assume the Normal item pool unless a line says otherwise.

What Retro changes

Retro is a world state, so it takes the slot that Standard, Open and Inverted otherwise fill. Underneath, it is Open with four switches forced on. In the generator's code the Retro world is built on the Open world and hard-sets four options: the rupee bow, generic keys, take-any caves and keys shuffled out of their dungeons. You start the way Open does, with Zelda already safe.

Big keys, maps and compasses are untouched. The options page says they stay locked to their own dungeons in Retro, so a dungeon still needs its own Big Key.

The bow does nothing until you buy the quiver

The options page sets out the rules. The first progressive bow fires wooden arrows only, and the second fires both wooden and silver arrows. Neither fires at all until you own the Rupee Quiver, an 80-rupee shop item. After that, each wooden arrow costs 10 rupees and each silver arrow costs 50.

Those two prices are a pair of values in the base ROM patch, 10 and 50, and the routine that fires a shot charges whichever one matches the bow you have equipped. It subtracts the price before the arrow leaves. If the subtraction would take your wallet below zero, the shot does not happen.

The generator's logic follows the same rule. The v31.0.6 update notes record the change: Retro now always requires the shop arrow to shoot, and progressive silvers no longer get around that. The generator's own Retro test file checks it. A bow on its own fails, and so do both bows together. A bow plus the quiver passes.

Where the quiver is sold

The options page says the quiver "only appears in one randomly chosen shop". The generator's code puts it in more places than that. Retro picks five of the nine regular shops to restock. The options page says the Bomb Shop and the Potion Shop are left out of that draw; in the generator, "Potion Shop" is the witch's hut in the Light World, which is not one of the nine, so the Dark World Potion Shop in the table below is still in the draw. Each of the five gets the same three slots: the quiver at 80, a small key at 100 and ten bombs at 50.

Separately, the code always gives the Dark World shop that sells the Red Shield a quiver. If that shop is not one of the five, its 30-rupee arrows become the quiver at 80. If it is one of the five, the quiver arrives with the restock anyway. The older Python Entrance Randomizer stocks Retro shops the same way, Red Shield shop included. If your seed comes with a spoiler log, its Shops section lists every active shop and take-any cave with its stock, and that settles it for your seed.

That 30-rupee arrow slot on the right is the one Retro turns into a quiver. These are the nine shops in the draw, under the names the generator uses:

What the quiver unlocks in the logic

In the No Glitches logic, these are the randomized checks and fights whose rules require a working bow, which in Retro means the bow and the quiver:

On the default Defeat Ganon goal that makes the quiver mandatory. Ganon's rule needs Agahnim beaten at the top of Ganon's Tower, and the logic only counts the tower as finished once it can reach the Moldorm Chest, which needs the bow and the quiver. Find the quiver early.

The Ganon rows are where Retro bites. Basic placement switches on what the code calls a better-bow requirement, so the logic sends you to Ganon expecting silver arrows, and every one of them costs 50 rupees. A missed silver arrow costs as much as five wooden shots. Bring a full wallet to the Pyramid.

Small keys open any door, and the logic expects you to buy them

In Retro, a small key opens a key door in any dungeon. The game has 61 small keys in all, as our small keys guide counts them, and the generator's item pool normally carries 29 of them. The other 32, most of them under pots or carried by enemies, are not in the pool. The options page says those pot and enemy keys stay where they always were, but in Retro they open any key door too.

The 29 pool keys get shuffled into the whole world, and the pool loses some of them first. On the Normal item pool, Retro removes all six of Palace of Darkness's and all four of Ganon's Tower's, ten in total, which leaves 19. On Hard and Expert it also removes Turtle Rock's four and Swamp Palace's one, fifteen in total, which leaves 14. Each removed key becomes a 20-rupee pickup. The v31.0.4 update notes describe the same ten and fifteen.

You make up the shortfall at the counter. Each of the five restocked shops sells small keys at 100 rupees, and the options page says there is no limit on how many you can buy.

The logic leans on that. The generator's item check has a shortcut written for this mode: once a shop that sells small keys is reachable, every small-key requirement in the logic counts as met. The comment above it admits the shortcut rests on a bad assumption the code has to live with until it is rewritten. Nothing in that check looks at your wallet. A Retro seed can therefore expect you to buy your way through key doors, so treat 100 rupees per locked door as part of the route rather than an emergency.

Five take-any caves, and one of them has your sword

The generator draws five caves from a list of 31 single-entrance caves and houses that normally hold no item. It gives four of them a choice between a Heart Container and a Blue Potion refill. The fifth gets a Progressive Sword. All five are free, all five are staffed by an old man, and you take one item from each.

The sword is pulled out of the item pool to make this work, which is why the options page says only three swords are left to find in the regular pool. On the Vanilla and Swordless weapon settings, the code puts 300 rupees in that cave instead.

The Heart Containers come with a ceiling. The options page says they are a bonus on top of the pool, but you cannot go past 20 hearts. The Normal pool already reaches 20 on its own: three starting hearts, ten boss Heart Containers, one standalone Heart Container and 24 Pieces of Heart. A take-any heart gets you there sooner, not further, and the generator's overflow rule turns a surplus Heart Container into 20 rupees. The Blue Potion refill only works if you already carry an empty bottle, and the bottles guide covers where the four bottles normally sit.

These are the 31 candidates, under the generator's names and region groups:

Eighteen of the 31 are in the Light World. A few carry entry rules of their own in the logic. The 20 and 50 Rupee Caves want a glove, both Bonk Fairies want the Pegasus Boots, and the three Dark World Lake Hylia ledge caves want the Flippers. Any of the 31 can hold the sword, so in Retro an empty-looking cave is worth a look.

Arrow drops turn into rupees

Arrows stop being ammo in Retro, so the game needs another way to pay for shots. The swap shows up in three places:

• The item pool. The standard junk pool holds twelve bundles of ten arrows and one single arrow. In Retro all thirteen become 5-rupee pickups. The removed keys and the pulled sword add more 20-rupee pickups on top.
• Enemy drops. The generator rewrites every arrow drop it writes to the ROM, from enemy prize packs to tree pulls. A 5-arrow drop becomes a blue rupee, worth 5, and a 10-arrow drop becomes a red rupee, worth 20.
• The Lake Hylia capacity upgrades. The Pond of Happiness stops selling arrow capacity, which has nothing left to hold. It sells bomb capacity instead, seven steps at 100 rupees each: six of +5, then a final +10. On the Hard and Expert pools it sells nothing at all. The v30.2 update notes record the arrow upgrades being pulled from the pond in Retro.

That swap reshuffles which drop table pays best. Our enemy drops guide lays out the game's seven prize tables of eight slots each. Do the arithmetic with Retro's swap applied and two of them out-earn the dedicated rupee table:

One catch. Unless a seed uses custom prize packs, the generator shuffles which of those seven tables each prize pack uses. The vanilla rule that archer guards drop arrows is no guide to who drops the money in your seed, so watch what falls.

The Retro price list

Everything Retro asks you to pay for, in one place:

The money comes from the 5- and 20-rupee pickups that replaced the arrows and keys, from arrow drops that now pay out in rupees, and from the usual grass and pots. Our rupee guide covers the vanilla economy that sits underneath all of this. Everything else we have written about the game is on the A Link to the Past coverage hub.

Quick Action Checklist

• Buy the quiver first. No bow fires without it, and in the logic the Eastern Palace and Palace of Darkness bosses and the Ganon's Tower climb all need it.
• Check the Red Shield shop. The code always stocks it with an 80-rupee quiver, and each of the five restocked shops sells one too.
• Read the spoiler log's Shops section if your seed has one. It lists every active shop and take-any cave with its stock.
• Budget 100 rupees per locked door. Once a key shop is reachable, the logic counts every small-key door as open.
• Spend silver arrows carefully. Each one costs 50 rupees, and Basic placement expects you to bring them to Ganon.
• Check single-entrance caves. Five of the 31 candidates are take-any caves, and one of them holds a sword.
• Take the Heart Container early if you want the hearts sooner. It cannot take you past 20.
• Carry an empty bottle if you would rather take the Blue Potion refill.
• Learn your seed's money droppers. Arrow drops pay out as blue and red rupees, and the prize tables are reshuffled per seed.