Users have found ways to break the 24-hour Amiibo drop rule in 'Breath of the Wild'

By Steven Petite March 12, 2017

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - amiibo Trailer - Nintendo E3 2016

One of the best aspects of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the thrill of discovery. From new weapons to armor to horses to valuables, the sprawling lands of Hyrule will gradually reveal secrets to the most attentive of adventurers. And though it’s fun to scale mountains and paraglide across lava, canvassing vast stretches for your next great find, sometimes you may just want a useful item to fall right in front of you. That’s where Zelda Amiibos come in, and with a little trickery, treasure chests can rain down from the sky as many times as you’d like.

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Nintendo’s NFC-enabled figurines can technically only be used once every 24-hours, but as Kotaku reported, there’s two ways to get around the rule. First, many of the 15 Zelda-themed Amiibos have exclusive rewards that have low drop rates, so save scumming — the process of constantly reloading a previous game to reach different results — has become popular for those desiring specific in-game assets. For instance, connecting Toon Link to Breath of the Wild is your only avenue for unlocking Link’s garb from The Wind Waker.

There’s another slightly more tedious method for skirting the 24-hour restriction, and it doesn’t require losing the loot you acquired by save scumming. If you disconnect your console from the internet and push the system’s internal clock forward 24-hours, the timer effectively resets. Rinse and repeat, and reap Amiibo rewards to your heart’s content.

Reddit user ShugoTakahashi data mined the figurines and has compiled a list of items connected to all of the Zelda Amiibos except for Twilight Princess Wolf Link, which spawns a wolf companion to join you in battle.

If you’re interested in rewards from the sky, you may have to do some real world adventuring. Nintendo released five Breath of the Wild Amiibos, and while those aren’t extremely difficult to secure right now, it’s likely they will be scarce before long. The 10 Amiibos that came before them? Be prepared to pay an unfortunate premium.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Steven is a writer from Northeast Ohio currently based in Louisiana. He writes about video games and books, and consumes…

Gaming

All Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Amiibo rewards

Link glides with a Majora's Mask-themed glider in Tears of the Kingdom.

While Amiibo are so cool that you may just want to display them, they still do serve functions in just about every Nintendo Switch game. Scanning them usually unlocks some type of reward in-game, which is true in both The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the new The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. There are dozens of Amiibo out there already, and even a couple of brand new ones made specifically for Link's latest adventures, so scanning them all in is close to impossible. Thankfully, not all of them have unique rewards, but there are a handful that you might want to consider scooping up for some special unlocks. Here are all the Tears of the Kingdom Amiibo rewards and how to activate them.
How to activate Amiibo

To access any Amiibo reward in Tears of the Kingdom, you need to first enable them by pausing the game and going to the System Menu. From here, simply change the amiibo disabled tab to Use amiibo.

Gaming

Does Tears of the Kingdom have traditional Zelda dungeons?

Link stands in front of a large stone structure in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

Before The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's launch, there was one question that fans kept asking: Would the sequel bring back traditional Zelda dungeons? That was something that was sorely lacking from Breath of the Wild, which replaced them with Divine Beasts. These were technically dungeons, but ones that were much smaller in scope and revolved around specific puzzling.

Nintendo would alleviate some fears days ahead of its launch by confirming that more familiar dungeons return for the sequel, but we weren't given a full idea of what that would entail. All we knew is that they'd be bigger and be themed. So, does Tears of the Kingdom actually usher in the return of classic Zelda dungeons? It's complicated. The answer is firmly between yes and no, depending on your definition of "traditional."
What are traditional Zelda dungeons?
Let's answer a tricky question first: What do we even mean when we say "traditional Zelda dungeon." That question will net you very different answers depending on who you ask. When I conducted an informal poll on the subject on social media, I found that no two answers were exactly alike. For some, it was just about scale and theme. For others, it was more about using specific items to gradually open up a space.

Gaming

Don’t expect Zelda’s $70 price to become the new Switch standard, says Nintendo

Link looks at his hand in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be Nintendo's first Switch game to be priced at $70. News that Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to one of the bestselling and most critically acclaimed titles on the system, will have an increased price compared to its predecessor came as a surprise over three-and-a-half years after its announcement. It also raised questions about what the future of pricing for Nintendo games will be, especially as Sony, Microsoft, and third-party publishers all upped the cost of their new games in recent years.
While Nintendo will release Tears of Kingdom at $70, a spokesperson for the company tells Digital Trends that this will not always be the case for its first-party games going forward.
"No," the spokesperson said when Digital Trends asked if this is a new standard. "We determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis."
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Official Trailer #2
To get more insight into the price shift, I spoke to Omdia Principal Analyst George Jijiashvili, who explains what has caused the price of games to go up in recent years and how Tears of the Kingdom demonstrates that Nintendo will "remain flexible about first-party title pricing." Ultimately, Nintendo fans are finally starting to feel the impact of inflation that's been sweeping across the game industry, even if it's only "on a case-by-case basis" for now.
The price is right
Nintendo claims that not every one of its significant first-party game will be $70, and we can actually already see that in action. Preorders just went live for Pikmin 4, which launches on July 21, after Tears of the Kingdom, and it only costs $60. Still, Zelda's price tag indicates that going forward, Nintendo will at least consider raising the price of its most anticipated games to $70. But why start with Tears of the Kingdom?
When asked why it chose Tears of the Kingdom as its first $70 Nintendo Switch game, a Nintendo spokesperson simply reiterated that the company will "determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis." Still, it's a surprising choice for Nintendo to make that pricing change to just one exclusive game almost six years into the Switch's life span. Jijiashvili thinks the choice to do this with Tears of the Kingdom was a pretty apparent one for Nintendo, although it won't apply to everything going forward.
"If you are going to make a game $70, it's going to be the follow-up to one of your most critically acclaimed and bestselling games ever," Jijiashvili tells Digital Trends. "I don’t think that this means that $70 will become the standard price for all major Nintendo releases. It's worth noting that Metroid Prime Remastered is priced at $40. It's clear that Nintendo will remain flexible about first-party title pricing."

It makes basic financial sense for Nintendo to ask for a little bit more for a game it knows will be one of the biggest releases of 2023. But what factors in the game industry and world's economy at large caused Nintendo to make this decision?
Priced Out
For more than a decade, people got comfortable with AAA video games being priced at $60. Of course, there were occasional exceptions to this rule, but it was seen as an industry standard until the dawn of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Publisher 2K was one of the first to announce a price increase, and companies like EA, Sony, and Microsoft have all followed suit. Jijiashvili chalks this up to inflation-related pressure on game publishers.
"The games industry has already been experiencing a lot of inflationary pressure," he explains. "AAA games are much more expensive to make now than they used to be, but prices have actually been declining in inflation-adjusted terms -- if prices had risen with inflation since 1990, they would now be over $90. On top of that, we’ve had a big burst of general inflation, meaning that publishers are looking at big increases in everything from salaries to tools. It’s going to be really hard for most publishers to avoid passing on all those extra costs at some point."
Jijiashvili provided us with a graphic created by Omdia that "shows what the typical price points for each generation would look like if you adjusted for inflation." As you can see, the inflation-adjusted prices are only exponentially growing, and the big game pricing shifts the graph highlights were all technically not even enough to keep up with inflation when they happened.