Breath of the Wild Dye Guide: All 15 Colors, Mapped

Every color of dye in Breath of the Wild costs the same 20 rupees, whether you are making it out of five Flints you picked up for free or five Diamonds you have been hoarding since the Great Plateau. Zelda Wiki's own entry for the Kochi Dye Shop is explicit about the mechanic behind that flat rate: Sayge asks for a color, then five materials that match it, and the price is 20 rupees regardless of what those five materials actually are. Fifteen different colors exist, each with its own completely separate ingredient list — some built from things you are already swimming in, one built from only two materials in the entire game.

This is the full register: every color, every material that makes it, which pieces of armor refuse to take the dye at all, and the one habit that saves you from spending something you actually needed on a hat.

The whole outfit dyes at once, for one flat price

Hateno Village's dye tradition is older than the shop itself, and Sayge explains the rule to you the first time you sit in his basin: your entire outfit gets dyed at once, head to toe, in a single pass. Whatever you are wearing when you sit down comes out the other side as one matching color, so the way to dye a single piece is to wear only that piece: once you are on the dye platform, Sayge offers to let you change clothes before you pick a color. The game stores the dye on each piece separately, so a helmet dyed on one visit and a tunic dyed on another can end up in different shades.

The shop itself sits in Hateno Village, and per Zelda Wiki it is the only shop of its kind anywhere in Hyrule — there is no second dye vendor to shop around against. Sayge runs it, his wife Senna greets you outside, and the process is always the same:

1. Pick a dye color from the wheel.
2. Hand over five materials that match that color.
3. Pay 20 rupees.
4. Get dropped into the basin, and climb out wearing your whole outfit in the new shade.

Sayge will also warn you before you start if you are wearing something that cannot be dyed at all — more on which pieces those are further down — and he is happy to redo the job immediately if you do not like the result. Nothing about the process is a one-shot gamble; the only real cost is the five materials.

All 15 dye colors and what makes them

There are exactly 15 dye colors in the base game, and every one of them is locked to its own list of qualifying materials. You are not choosing a color and then picking any five items — the game checks that each material you hand over is actually tagged for that color, so the list below is the complete menu for each one.

A few things about that table are worth pulling out on their own, because they are the parts that actually change what you do with it.

The three dragons hand you three of these colors directly, and this is one place the site already has it right: our dragon farming guide notes that Farosh parts make Light Yellow, a Shard of Dinraal's Horn makes Crimson, and Naydra's Scale makes Light Blue — and the full table above confirms all three, plus the fact that each dragon's claw and fang shard qualify for the same color as its scale and horn. If you are already running the dragon routes for the Barbarian Set's horn shards, you are one Tabantha Great Bridge stop away from also owning a Crimson dye batch.

Monster parts you are already hoarding for the cooking guide's elixir tiers double up here too: Bokoblin Guts (Purple), Bokoblin Fang (Light Yellow), and Bokoblin Horn (Gray) are each locked to one specific color and nothing else, so a single Bokoblin camp can pay out the ingredients for three completely different dyes depending on which part you keep.

Gray is the easy one — fourteen materials work

Count the entries in the table and Gray is the outlier by a wide margin: fourteen different materials qualify for it, more than double the next largest color. Half of that list is monster horns, fangs and talons that pile up in your inventory from routine fighting — Bokoblin Horn, Moblin Horn, Moblin Fang, Lizalfos Horn, Lizalfos Talon, Keese Wing — and the other half is the six Ancient material types the Guardian family drops between them, from the Ancient Screws every Decayed Guardian carries up to the Giant Ancient Cores only a Stalker, Turret, or Skywatcher can drop. Our Guardian guide has the full drop-rate table for those parts if you want to know which Guardian type to farm for them.

Black is nearly as forgiving in practice even with only four listed materials, because one of them is Flint, which Zelda Wiki lists as a drop from ordinary Ore Deposits as well as Luminous Stone and Rare Ore Deposits, so routine mining keeps you stocked. Do not count on a Stone Talus for it, though: Zelda Wiki's drop table gives one a guaranteed Ruby, while Flint is only a 10% chance on its other drops, against 70% for Amber. Between Gray's long list and Black's mining-pile staple, those two are the colors you can make without planning a trip for.

Navy is the hard one — only two materials exist

At the opposite end sits Navy, which has exactly two qualifying materials in the entire game: Bladed Rhino Beetle and Luminous Stone. Every other color on this list has at least four ways to hit your five, which means Navy is the only dye where running short on one ingredient genuinely leaves you with nowhere else to turn.

Luminous Stone is the more reliable half of that pair. Our Hyrule Compendium guide and field bosses guide both note that Luminous Stone Deposits cluster around Zora's Domain in the Lanayru Great Spring and turn up as a guaranteed drop from every Stone Talus (Luminous) — twelve of which exist on the map. Bladed Rhino Beetles, per Zelda Wiki, only spawn on trees in the Necluda region, which makes them the narrower half of the recipe geographically even though Luminous Stone is the rarer material on paper.

The five slots do not have to match each other

One detail Sayge never spells out directly: the five materials you hand over do not need to be five of the same item. They only need to share a color tag. Bring one Ruby and four Apples and that is a perfectly valid Red dye — the game checks the color, not the item name.

That matters most on the expensive-looking colors. White dye's list includes Star Fragment, Diamond, and Lynel Horn, which reads like a color that costs a fortune to make — but it also includes Hylian Rice and Fresh Milk, both common general-store stock. Padding a batch with four Hylian Rice and one whatever-White-item you already happen to be holding gets you the exact same White as five Diamonds, for a fraction of the cost.

The armor Sayge cannot touch at any price

The standard armor sets — every elemental set, the Ancient set, the Barbarian set, the Climbing set, even the Wild Set from clearing all 120 shrines — take a dye without any fuss. The game itself decides which pieces can: every dyeable piece carries an ArmorDye tag in the game's actor data, and the pause-menu code in the community decompilation only counts tagged armor as dyeable. Reading that tag across the armor in a dump of the game files, and checking it against the Zelda Wiki and Fandom item pages that cover dyeing, gives seven groups of armor Sayge will not dye:

Paying for a piece tells you nothing about whether it will dye. Kilton's goods cost Mon, the jewelry costs rupees plus gems, and once you have found the Salvager Vest, Royal Guard Uniform or Phantom Armor, Granté in Tarrey Town sells it back for 50 rupees, and none of those take a dye. Amiibo armor is not a blanket rule either: the four Divine Beast helms, which come from the Mipha, Daruk, Revali and Urbosa amiibo, carry the tag and dye like anything else.

Refusing the dye says nothing about upgrades, either. The Champion's Tunic, the Gerudo jewelry and the amiibo armor in the table all have Great Fairy upgrade tiers (the Tunic climbs from 5 to 32 defense), while Kilton's goods, the Thunder Helm and the DLC and bonus pieces have none. Our Great Fairy guide covers that side.

Do not burn your good materials on a hat color

Because the five slots do not have to match, it is easy to reach for whatever you are holding without checking what else that item is worth. A few materials on the color table above are doing double duty elsewhere in this vertical, and spending them on a recolor is a worse trade than it looks:

• Lynel Horn, Lynel Hoof, and Lynel Guts make White, Black, and Crimson respectively — and all three are also the exact currency the Lynel guide prices out for the Barbarian Set's four-star upgrade. A full set costs 12 Horns, 18 Hooves, and 9 Guts, so burning even one on a dye batch is a real dent if you are actively farming toward that set.
• Dinraal's, Farosh's, and Naydra's Scale, Claw, and horn/fang shards feed Crimson, Light Yellow, and Light Blue — and the horn shards specifically are also the dragon-side half of that same Barbarian Set recipe, one dragon per piece.
• Giant Ancient Core qualifies for Gray — and per the Guardian guide, it is also one of the two materials the Ancient Shield and Ancient Bow require at Cherry's shop, dropping at only 0.5% per kill from a Stalker, Turret, or Skywatcher.

None of that means those materials are off-limits for dyeing — Gray has thirteen other options that are not a Guardian's rarest drop, and White has six other options that are not Lynel gear. The point is just to check the rest of this vertical before you feed something rare into a basin for a color you could have gotten from a Hylian Shroom instead.

Quick Action Checklist

• Remember the whole outfit dyes at once, so wear only the pieces you want recolored; Sayge lets you change clothes on the dye platform before you pick a color.
• Every color costs the same flat 20 rupees, so price is never the reason to pick one color over another.
• Pad an expensive-looking recipe with its cheapest qualifying material — the five slots only need to match the color, not each other.
• Farm Gray from routine Guardian and monster-part drops; it has fourteen qualifying materials, the most of any color.
• Treat Navy as the scarce one. Only Bladed Rhino Beetle and Luminous Stone qualify, and Luminous Stone Deposits near Zora's Domain are the more reliable source.
• Do not spend Lynel Horn, Lynel Hoof, Lynel Guts, dragon parts, or a Giant Ancient Core on a dye batch if you are still working toward the Barbarian Set or an Ancient Shield/Bow — all of it has a second use with steeper stakes.
• Check the table before committing to a trip: Kilton's masks and Dark set, the Gerudo Town circlets and earrings, the Champion's Tunic, the Thunder Helm, the amiibo Hero and Fierce Deity sets plus Sheik's Mask, and the Master Trials, Champions' Ballad, Nintendo Switch and Salvager pieces cannot be dyed at any price.