Tears of the Kingdom Purah Pad Upgrades and the Compendium

The Purah Pad a Steward Construct hands you on the Great Sky Island is not finished. Open its Camera or Hyrule Compendium and the screen says the feature is not yet available, and it stays that way until a Main Quest in the Depths. The Sensor, Sensor +, Hero's Path Mode and the Travel Medallion come later still, one Side Adventure at a time, from Robbie's lab outside Hateno Village.

The order matters, two of those upgrades want a good chunk of the map explored first, and the Compendium they all feed has 509 entries. Robbie will sell you the ones you miss, at 100 rupees a picture. This guide covers the whole chain: what unlocks each feature, what each one asks for, what filling the Compendium costs, and which boss entries have no rematch, so they are best photographed mid-fight. Quest steps and in-game text come from Zelda Wiki. Its Tears of the Kingdom pages for several of these quests are still stubs, so Thonky, GamerGuides, Game8 and GameWith fill specific gaps, and each is credited where it is used.

Every upgrade and what it asks for

Finish all three "Presenting" quests and Robbie declares the Purah Pad perfect, then extends the verdict to you, per the line Zelda Wiki quotes.

Camera Work in the Depths unlocks the camera

Josha's Main Quest opens once you have started "Regional Phenomena." She wants to go down a chasm herself to look for more of the figure pictured on a slate fragment the Zonai Survey Team brought up. Robbie won't let her, and volunteers to go instead with you as his bodyguard. Josha hands you 10 Brightbloom Seeds and five arrows before you leave.

The route, per Zelda Wiki: drop into the Hyrule Field Chasm south of Lookout Landing, where Ponnick is waiting at the bottom having lost track of Robbie. A note at Nisoij Lightroot sends you west to Iayusus Lightroot, where Robbie is waiting by a campfire near a Statue That Points the Way. He asks for the Pad, finds the Camera and the Compendium both locked, and unlocks them. Photograph the statue, show the picture to Josha back at Lookout Landing, and she pays you five Zonaite.

Two things to know. The Compendium switches on at the same moment as the Camera, so any creature, monster, material, piece of equipment or treasure you photograph from then on registers, per the "Filling Out the Compendium" Adventure Log text. And if you are playing a cartridge that has never been updated, patch it first: Nintendo's Ver. 1.1.2 notes list a fix for this quest, where players could not progress beyond a certain point.

The statue also sets up the next Main Quest. Once you have cleared one temple, Josha's "A Mystery in the Depths" sends you along a chain of these statues to Autobuild and the first Master Kohga fight, which our Master Kohga guide covers.

Robbie moves to Hateno, and the Sensor comes first

Zelda Wiki puts the trigger in one sentence: once you have finished one of the four "Regional Phenomena" quests and repaired Robbie's Hot-Air Balloon during "A Mystery in the Depths", Robbie goes back to the Hateno Ancient Tech Lab. The Adventure Log calls it the Purah Pad Research Lab. It is on the hill past Hateno Village, at the edge of East Necluda.

Talk to him at Lookout Landing first to start "Hateno Village Research Lab," then meet him at the lab. He installs the Sensor, which Zelda Wiki says beeps louder as you move toward a nearby Shrine of Light and tells you when the shrine is directly above or below you. His test target is Mayahisik Shrine, inside Retsam Forest Cave at the bottom of the hill. Thonky puts the cave's north entrance at 3750, -2028, 0191. It is a Rauru's Blessing shrine with a Magic Scepter in its chest, per Zelda Wiki, and one of the underground Necluda blessings our shrines guide counts. Report back and Robbie offers three more upgrades.

The three Presenting quests

All three come from Robbie and can run in parallel. Thonky notes that Robbie puts up a poster of instructions as upgrades go in, and the screenshot above shows three of them pinned to the lab's chalkboard.

Travel Medallion: a Yiga-guarded chest in Akkala

Ask about this one first. Thonky notes that doing so adds the Hateno lab as a warp point, and Zelda Wiki quotes Robbie saying he has activated a travel gate outside the lab. Every later trip back to him is then one warp.

Robbie left the prototype at the Akkala Ancient Tech Lab, and the Adventure Log passes on a rumour that the lab has been taken over by intruders. Jochi-iu Shrine sits between East Akkala Stable and the lab, per Zelda Wiki, and GamerGuides calls it the closest warp. At the door a Yiga Footsoldier and a Yiga Blademaster stop you. Beat both and go in.

Inside is Konba, whom Zelda Wiki lists as one of three Cece fans the Yiga Clan kidnapped and forced to sew for them. He hands you the Yiga Armor he was making and mentions that the full Yiga Clan Attire lets you blend in with the clan. That chest piece is one of the three you need for the Side Adventure "Infiltrating the Yiga Clan", and it is the same disguise our paraglider fabrics guide needs for the Yiga Fabric from Yiga Clan Training. The prototype is in a chest beside Robbie's desk there, in Robbie's own words as Zelda Wiki quotes them.

Back at Hateno, Robbie finishes it. The Travel Medallion is a Key Item, and its description says you place it by opening your inventory and registering your current location as a travel gate.

The quest is not over when you get the first one. The Adventure Log text, which Zelda Wiki reproduces, lays out the rest:

Zelda Wiki counts 15 Skyview Towers, and GamerGuides reads "regions mapped" as towers activated, so the third medallion means activating all 15. In Breath of the Wild the Travel Medallion was DLC, from The Master Trials, and held one location, per Zelda Wiki. Three portable warp points in a game with a sky layer and a Depths layer is the upgrade I would chase first.

Hero's Path Mode: 15 shrines of data

Robbie wants "data from 15 shrine locations." Thonky reads that as visiting at least 15 shrines. Once it is installed, the game's prompt tells you to press X on the map screen to see your journey's path so far.

That sounds like a novelty, and for a completionist it is the opposite. Turn it on during a Korok or cave sweep and the gaps in your path are the parts of a region you have never walked through.

Sensor +: five monsters, then it finds anything

Robbie needs "data from five types of monsters". Thonky's version is to photograph five different monsters and come back. Sensor + then pinpoints anything registered in your Hyrule Compendium. In the Compendium screen, "Target with Sensor" sits on the Y button, visible in the screenshot below.

The catch is the word registered. Sensor + only finds things you have already photographed or bought. One picture of a Luminous Stone Deposit turns it into a finder for the rest, which matters if you are feeding Dondons as our rupee guide describes.

The Compendium is 509 entries in five tabs

Zelda Wiki counts 509 entries. Counting its list by tab gives this:

Equipment is over a third of the book. It opens with the Master Sword at 329 and runs through the weapons, the Arrow at 440, the 30 bows at 441 to 470 and the 33 shields at 471 to 503, which our bows and shields guides list in full. Treasure is the smallest tab at six: Treasure Chest, Ore Deposit, Rare Ore Deposit, Luminous Stone Deposit, Zonaite Deposit and Well. The Monsters tab ends with the four dragons and the story bosses, 188 to 202.

Finishing all 509 earns Robbie's Fabric, the reward our paraglider fabrics guide lists among its four collection fabrics. If you finished the last game's version, our Breath of the Wild Compendium guide covers how Symin ran the same shop there.

Robbie sells the gaps at 100 rupees a picture

Once Sensor + is installed, Thonky says, checking the compendium database machine on the lab table starts "Filling Out the Compendium." Robbie says his collection is complete and offers to sell you pictures to fill the gaps in yours. Zelda Wiki's price list for his stock:

You choose the category and Robbie chooses the picture. Game8 says he picks from whatever is missing in that category, so you cannot buy one specific entry while other gaps in the same tab are open. Buy when a tab is down to entries you cannot be bothered to hunt, not before.

What buying everything costs. Sensor + needs five monsters you photographed yourself, so a buy-everything run is at most 504 pictures. At 100 rupees each that is 50,400 rupees by my arithmetic, plus 400 more for every one that is an Elite Enemy Picture. GameWith's own estimate for the whole job is about 60,000. For scale, our rupee guide totals 79,800 rupees of Great Fairy fees to take every upgradable armor piece to four stars.

The Elite pictures are the boss shelf. Zelda Wiki prices them but does not yet list which Tears of the Kingdom entries count as Elite. GameWith says the 500-rupee pictures of certain powerful enemies and bosses become available after you have defeated them, under a heading that reads "Some Can Be Purchased After Clearing". The item text points the same way: a monster that at one time stood in your way.

Boss entries to photograph mid-fight

Blood Moons bring ordinary monsters back, per Zelda Wiki, so a missed photo of a Bokoblin just means finding another Bokoblin. A handful of boss entries have no rematch arena, and these are the ones to shoot during the fight rather than pay 500 for later.

Zelda Wiki's Seized Construct page names it as one of the few Tears of the Kingdom bosses Link cannot rematch, and names the Sludge Like, Master Kohga and Moragia among the other examples. Our Master Kohga guide has his four fights. Zelda Wiki describes Moragia's fight at the top of Death Mountain and the Sludge Like that ambushes you and Sidon at Mipha Court, and the datamined object map at radar-totk.zeldamods.org has exactly one Sludge Like placement, in Upland Zorana. The Seized Construct does get a second copy at Gloom's Lair during the final war, but Zelda Wiki says that if Mineru already has her Secret Stone, she deals with it herself.

The other four temple bosses are safe. Zelda Wiki's Boss Rematch page lists 12 arenas in the Depths, three each for Colgera, Marbled Gohma, Mucktorok and Queen Gibdo, and each one stays empty until you have beaten that boss once. Phantom Ganon is safe too: Zelda Wiki says one appears wherever you finish off a Gloom Spawn.

So is the final battle, even though it has no rematch arena. After the credits, PowerPyx says your last save carries a star and loading it puts you back before the final boss, so both Demon King Ganondorf entries (199 and 200, one per form) and the Demon Dragon (201) can be photographed on a second run. Zelda Wiki adds that a Demon Dragon photo is added to the Compendium and stays in the Album after the ending. Our boss guide covers the final-battle forms.

Entries you can log without a hunt

• The sages' weapons. Zelda Wiki notes that photographing a Sage Avatar's weapon registers it, even though the avatar is translucent. That covers the Boulder Breaker, the Lightscale Trident, the Scimitar of the Seven and Tulin's bow, as our sages guide points out.
• The dragons. Dinraal, Naydra, Farosh and the Light Dragon are entries 188 to 190 and 202, and all four are out flying their routes. Our Master Sword guide has the Light Dragon's.
• The Treasure tab. Six entries: a Treasure Chest, three kinds of ore deposit, the Zonaite Deposit and a Well. Our cave guide counts 58 wells, and the Zonaite Deposit comes on your first proper Depths run.

One map note while you are in the Purah Pad menus: Zelda Wiki says the map holds up to 6 pins and 300 stamps. Nintendo's Ver. 1.2.1 notes fixed an issue that sometimes made the screen flicker intensely when large numbers of stamps were placed, so stamp freely on a patched game.

More Hyrule lives on the Tears of the Kingdom hub, the opening hours are in our beginner guide, and everything else we are playing is on the Mythras blog.

Quick Action Checklist

• Start "Camera Work in the Depths" as soon as "Regional Phenomena" begins. Photograph the statue at Iayusus Lightroot. The Camera and the Compendium unlock together.
• Clear one temple and "A Mystery in the Depths", then talk to Robbie at Lookout Landing to start "Hateno Village Research Lab."
• Sensor: find Mayahisik Shrine in Retsam Forest Cave below the Hateno lab.
• Ask about the Travel Medallion first. It adds a warp point at the lab. The prototype is in the Akkala Ancient Tech Lab behind a Yiga Footsoldier and Blademaster, and Konba inside gives you the Yiga Armor.
• Travel Medallions two and three unlock at 10 and 15 mapped regions. There are 15 Skyview Towers.
• Hero's Path Mode needs data from 15 shrines. Sensor + needs five monsters in the Compendium.
• Robbie's pictures cost 100 rupees, or 500 for Elite Enemy Pictures, and he picks which entry within the category. Buying everything after Sensor + is at least 50,400 rupees.
• Photograph Master Kohga, Moragia, the Sludge Like and the Seized Construct during their fights. The other four temple bosses can be rematched in the Depths, and the post-credits save puts you back before the final boss for Ganondorf and the Demon Dragon.
• Photograph Sage Avatar weapons to register the Boulder Breaker, Lightscale Trident, Scimitar of the Seven and Tulin's bow.
• All 509 entries earn Robbie's Fabric.