Tears of the Kingdom Depths Guide: Lightroots, Poes, and What Is Actually Down There

The Depths has no Skyview Towers, no weather, and no landmark you can see from more than about twenty feet away. It is the only region in Tears of the Kingdom where the map starts as a solid black rectangle and stays that way until you personally walk into things.

It also has a complete map that you already filled in. You just filled it in on the wrong layer.

Everything below is checked against Zelda Wiki's Tears of the Kingdom pages, because half the "facts" floating around about the Depths are people repeating a rumor they heard in 2023.

Hyrule, flipped and switched off

The Depths is not a dungeon and it is not a separate world. It is a one-to-one geometric mirror of the surface, stretched across the same coordinate grid. Anything with an X and Y coordinate up top has a counterpart at the same X and Y down below, which means the Purah Pad you have already been filling in for forty hours is a Depths map with the labels rubbed off.

That is the whole trick, and it is worth internalizing before your first descent, because the alternative is wandering blind through a pitch-black cavern hoping to trip over something.

120 Lightroots for 120 surface shrines

Lightroots are the roots of the giant trees that grow down into the Depths, and touching one does four things at once: it lights a wide radius permanently, reveals that chunk of map, becomes a fast-travel point, and purges gloom from your hearts as though you were standing in daylight.

There are 120 Lightroots, and that number is not arbitrary. Tears of the Kingdom has 152 Shrines of Light — 120 on the surface, 32 in the sky. Every surface shrine has a Lightroot directly beneath it at the same coordinates. The 32 sky shrines have no root at all.

Then there is the naming gag, which is also a tool. Every Lightroot name is its shrine name spelled backwards. Sinatanika Shrine up top, Akinatanis Lightroot down below. So the relationship runs both ways: an unfound Lightroot tells you where an unfound shrine is, and a shrine you have already cleared tells you exactly where to aim your paraglider in the dark.

That is the actual answer to "how do I explore the Depths efficiently." You do not explore it. You open your surface map, pick an unvisited shrine, and go stand under it.

The mirror rules, in full

The mirroring goes well past shrines. Learn this table and you can predict what is coming out of the dark before you can see it:

The water rule is the one that saves the most time. If your route down there dead-ends into a sheer wall for no visible reason, look at where you are on the surface map — you are standing at the bottom of a lake, and there is no way through. Go around.

The stable rule is the one that saves the most hearts. Every stable on the surface has a Lynel loitering under it. Free horn farm if you want one, unplanned ambush if you did not.

Getting down: 39 chasms

There are 39 chasms in Hyrule, each one a vertical hole ringed in gloom, and three of them are hidden at the bottom of wells rather than out in the open. Any of them will do — dive in, glide down, land on the loose dirt piles the game generously scatters at the bottom.

The one to actually use first is the Hyrule Field Chasm south of Lookout Landing, because that is where the game sends you and because it drops you close to the Great Abandoned Central Mine. That is where Autobuild lives. Autobuild is not one of your four starting powers and it does not appear anywhere on the surface, which means every player who skipped the Depths spent their first thirty hours rebuilding the same hoverbike by hand. The full breakdown of what it does is in the Ultrahand and Zonai device guide.

While you are on the Great Plateau, there is a small Bargainer Statue buried at the entrance that talks to you. Following it kicks off "A Call from the Depths," which asks you to throw four stone eyes down the Great Plateau's four chasms and deliver them to the statue under the Great Abandoned Central Mine. It pays out a Heart Container or a Stamina Vessel, your choice, and it opens the Poe economy properly.

Gloom is a debuff, not damage

This is the thing that trips people up. Gloom does not chip hearts. It locks them. Hearts lost to gloom turn grey and cracked and stay gone, and no amount of regular food brings them back.

The recovery rules, precisely:

• On the surface or in the sky, gloom-locked hearts come back on their own at one heart per second.
• In the Depths, they do not come back at all. Neither does anything you lose fighting Gloom Spawn or Phantom Ganon.
• Standing in a Lightroot's light purges them as though you were topside — this is the single biggest reason to light up the map before you go looking for trouble.
• A dish cooked with a Sundelion or a Sun Pumpkin grants Gloom Recovery, which unlocks the hearts. It does not refill them. If you want the hearts back and full, cook a Sundelion into something that also heals, or sleep in a bed.
• Gloom always takes whole hearts, never halves or quarters. And if you are carrying yellow Extra Hearts when gloom lands, all of them vanish at once.

One more piece of small print worth knowing before it happens to you: if gloom has ground your life gauge below five hearts and you die, a Fairy revives you with a maximum of five.

What gloom resistance does not cover

Gloom Resistance — the effect on the Of the Depths armor set and on Dark Clump dishes — is narrower than the name suggests. It blocks environmental gloom and it blocks Gloom Spawn. It does nothing at all against gloom-wreathed enemies, which is most of the wildlife down here. Those attacks punch straight through and take maximum hearts regardless of what you are wearing.

So the set is worth having, and it will not save you from a gloom-wreathed Silver Bokoblin. Read the armor guide for the full upgrade path and the set bonus that adds one more buffer heart.

The counter-play is the Master Sword, which deals an extra 15 damage against anything gloom-wreathed. If you have not pulled it yet, the Light Dragon guide is the fastest route.

Bring your own sun

Brightbloom Seeds are the flashlight. Throw one, hit one, or fuse one to an arrow and it blooms into a light source. Giant Brightbloom Seeds cover a far larger radius and are the only sensible option for lighting a route you intend to walk twice. Both come out of surface caves and wells, so stock up before you descend rather than after — and Little Frox drop the regular ones down here if you run dry.

The pro move is fusing a Brightbloom Seed to an arrow and firing it at the ceiling ahead of you. It costs one arrow and one seed and turns a fifty-meter blind walk into a lit corridor.

There is also armor that solves this passively. The Miner Set — the Miner's Mask, Top and Trousers — glows on its own, and each piece sits in a chest in a different Depths mine. The Mask is in the Abandoned Kara Kara Mine. It is not defensive armor worth writing home about, but a hands-free light source with no consumable cost is exactly what you want on a long Poe run.

Poes and the 650-Poe wardrobe

Poes are the Depths currency — blue will-o'-the-wisps that drift around in the dark and cost nothing but a walk to pick up. Three sizes exist, and the exchange rate is fixed:

• Poe — 1
• Large Poe — 5
• Grand Poe — 20

They stack to 999,999, one of only a handful of items in the game with that ceiling, so there is no reason to ever walk past one.

You spend them at Bargainer Statues, of which there are eight: six in the Depths, one at Lookout Landing, and the mute one at the Great Plateau that only exists to start the quest. Every Depths statue sits directly beneath a Great Goddess Statue on the surface or in the sky, so you already know where they are.

The catch is that stock unlocks by discovery, not by wealth. Each new statue you open widens the catalogue at all of them, so you cannot buy the Hood of the Depths off the first statue no matter how many Poes you are hauling. If you get impatient, the Lookout Landing statue will sell you the map location of a Depths statue you have not found for 100 Poes.

Bargainer Statue price list

That is 650 Poes for the full Of the Depths set and another 650 for the cosmetic Dark set. Note that the Hood of the Depths arrives pre-upgraded one level by a Great Fairy, which is a small kindness given it is the last thing you can unlock.

Dark Clumps are worth a mention on their own: they are the gloom-resistant cooking ingredient, they drop from Gloom Spawn, and at 10 Poes each they are the cheapest way to cook a stack of gloom-proof meals before a long run.

Zonaite is the actual payday

Poes buy clothes. Zonaite buys the game.

Zonaite Deposits exist almost nowhere except the Depths, they glow green so you can spot them from a distance in the dark, and they cluster hardest at monster outposts, where the Bokoblins are mining them for you and occasionally carrying lumps around in backpacks. Like Poes, Zonaite stacks to 999,999.

You trade it to a Forge Construct — one waits in most of the ten Abandoned Mines, plus the tutorial one in the Mining Cave on the Great Sky Island — at 3 zonaite per Crystallized Charge. Charges feed the battery upgrade chain, and the full arithmetic on that (spoiler: one Energy Well costs 300 zonaite) is laid out in the Zonai device guide.

The other Depths-only currency is knowledge. Yiga Relay Bases scattered through the dark each hide a storehouse guarded by one Footsoldier; drop him and you get two stone chests holding a Large Crystallized Charge and a Yiga Schematic. There are 34 schematics in total, and they hand Autobuild pre-made blueprints for things like the Fanboat, the Tank, the Instant Kitchen and the Liftoff Glider. Free vehicle designs, one dead ninja each.

What will actually kill you

Three things, in ascending order of annoyance.

Gloom-wreathed everything. Standard Bokoblins, Moblins, Horriblins and Lizalfos, but wrapped in red and dealing gloom on hit. They hit harder than their surface versions and, as covered above, your gloom resistance is irrelevant against them.

Frox. The Scourge of the Depths, a giant frog with 700 HP and a 22-damage attack that inhales everything in front of it. The weak points are its single eye and the Zonaite Deposits growing out of its back, which have 140 HP each — and here is the good bit, damage dealt to a deposit is split between the deposit and the Frox itself. Throw a Bomb Flower or a Time Bomb into its open mouth to stun it, climb up, and beat on the rocks. It drops Zonaite, Large Zonaite and a Large Crystallized Charge, so it pays for the fight.

Gloom Spawn. The hands. Five of them, 250 HP each for 1,250 total, and they patrol a moving pool of gloom that drains your maximum hearts on contact. Kill a hand too slowly and it climbs back out at half health. Kill all five and they fuse into a Phantom Ganon, which is the actual fight. They cannot climb sheer walls, they are stunned by fire and explosions, they go limp when you shoot a hand in the eye, and they are completely deaf — sprint and whistle all you like. If you keep away from them long enough, most of them simply dissolve into a handful of Dark Clumps and leave. Free crafting materials for running away.

Worth knowing: the Master Sword does not awaken near Gloom Spawn, only near the Phantom Ganon they become.

The 31 legendary items nobody mentions

Here is the part that gets buried under the shrine counting. Scattered through the Depths, in Zonai-style stone chests, are 31 legendary items pulled from previous Zelda games. Not references. The actual gear.

The tunic, cap and trousers sets from The Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time, The Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild are all down there as complete three-piece sets, plus Biggoron's Sword, the Sea-Breeze Boomerang and Shield, the Korok Mask, Ravio's Hood, Midna's Helmet, Zant's Helmet, Sheik's Mask and Majora's Mask. The game never explains why any of it is buried under Hyrule and never comments on it afterwards.

You find them with Old Maps, which sit on sky islands and hand you the exact coordinates of a Depths chest. So the loop is: fly up, read a map, dive down, dig it out. Sky and Depths, feeding each other.

The coliseums are the hard version

Six of those items are not in mines. They are in coliseums — the Floating, Forest, Desert, Scorching, Secluded and Lone Island Coliseums — and a coliseum works like this: you walk toward the chest in the middle, the door slams, and it starts sending Lynels.

The Floating Coliseum in the Central Hyrule Depths, directly beneath the Coliseum Ruins, runs five waves: a regular Lynel, a Blue-Maned, a White-Maned, and then two Silver Lynels back to back, the second one armored. Clear all five and the gloom around the chest lifts and Majora's Mask is yours.

And Majora's Mask is genuinely one of the best items in the game — most enemies simply do not attack you while it is on, including Horriblins, which is new for Tears of the Kingdom. If you fluff the fight and never want to see it again, Bargainer Statues will sell you a replacement for 400 Poes once you have owned one. The Floating Coliseum Lynels ignore the disguise, though, so no, you cannot wear it into the arena and skip the whole thing.

If you are going Lynel hunting anyway, their horns are the top of the damage chart in the Fuse guide.

A route that works

1. Descend through the Hyrule Field Chasm south of Lookout Landing.
2. Head for the Great Abandoned Central Mine and take Autobuild.
3. Do "A Call from the Depths" off the Great Plateau statue for a Heart Container or Stamina Vessel and a working Poe economy.
4. Switch to Lightroot-hopping: open the surface map, pick a shrine you have cleared, glide to those coordinates in the dark, touch the root, repeat. Every root is a fast-travel node, so the network builds itself.
5. Once you have a corridor of lit roots, start clearing the monster outposts between them for Zonaite and the Relay Bases for schematics.
6. Buy the Of the Depths set at 650 Poes, then go looking for coliseums.

There is more Hyrule on the Tears of the Kingdom hub, and everything else we are playing sits on the Mythras blog. If you have not been down at all yet, the beginner guide covers what to do before your first dive.

Quick Action Checklist

• The Depths mirrors the surface exactly. Your existing map is a Depths map with the labels off.
• 120 Lightroots sit beneath the 120 surface shrines at matching coordinates, with names spelled backwards. The 32 sky shrines have none.
• 39 chasms lead down, three of them hidden in wells. Start with Hyrule Field, south of Lookout Landing.
• Gloom locks hearts. They return at one heart per second on the surface and never in the Depths unless you stand in a Lightroot or eat a Sundelion dish.
• Gloom Resistance covers environmental gloom and Gloom Spawn only. Gloom-wreathed enemies ignore it completely.
• Giant Brightbloom Seeds fused to arrows and fired at the ceiling are the cheapest way to light a route.
• Poe rates: Large is 5, Grand is 20, and they stack to 999,999.
• Eight Bargainer Statues, six of them in the Depths under Goddess Statues. Stock unlocks by discovery, not by wealth.
• Zonaite trades at 3 per Crystallized Charge with any Forge Construct in the ten Abandoned Mines.
• 34 Yiga Schematics live in Relay Base storehouses. Kill the guard, open two chests.
• Frox: 700 HP, 140 per back deposit, damage to a deposit also damages the Frox.
• Gloom Spawn: five hands, 250 HP each, 1,250 total, and they become Phantom Ganon.
• 31 legendary items from older Zelda games are buried down there. Old Maps on sky islands give you the coordinates.