Zelda Breath of the Wild guide: Everything you need to know about elixirs, critters and monster parts (2024)

Meals are great in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for restoring your hearts. You can even cook them to give you an additional effect like heat or cold resistance. But sometimes you don’t need or want to waste a healing meal just for the effect. That’s where those monster parts you’ve been picking up come in handy. You can use them to make elixirs.

Below, we’ll list the elixirs you can make, and how you can adjust their effects with the ingredients you include.

Elixirs

You cook elixirs just like you cook meals. They’re a drink that will give you one of the beneficial effects without having to worry about wasting any valuable healing. Every elixir is made by combining a critter — an insect, lizard or frog — and a monster part. Just like meals, you’ll only ever get one effect at a time from an elixir — you can’t mix heat resistance and increased stealth, for example.

There are two categories of elixirs. Some have an all or nothing effect — like stealth or fire guard — and some that create various degrees of an effect — like heat or cold resistance. And this is where some math comes in.

Effect and duration

Your choice of ingredients determines two things about the resulting elixir: The effect and the duration.

Effect

The critter you select determines the effect and impacts the duration. You can figure out which effect you’ll get by just reading the description of the critter. For certain elixirs, the number of critters you include will determine the strength of your elixir — one critter will give you a weak elixir, while four critters will give you the strongest elixir.

Duration

Duration is a little harder to pin down. Monster parts only affect the duration of an elixir, never the effect. Rarity of the monster part is the key to understanding how the duration is affected. Bokoblin horns add one minute to the duration of the elixir, while bokoblin guts add three. A good rough guide to this is how many you have in your inventory — if you’ve got a lot of something, it’s probably more common.

All or nothing effect elixirs

These elixirs don’t have any levels of effect. For example, you are either fireproof or you’re not — there are no degrees of not being on fire. This means that all you control with your choice of ingredients is the duration, so it makes sense to use one critter and four monster parts.

• Fireproof elixir grants fireproof effect, which will keep you from catching on fire in very hot places like Death Mountain. The only critters that will grant this effect are the fireproof lizard (even though the description only says "heat-resistance") and the smotherwing butterfly.
• Hasty elixir increases speed. Look for critters with "speed-boosting" in the description like a hightail lizard or a hot-footed frog.
• Mighty elixir increases attack. Look for "attack" in the critter description like a bladed rhino beetle.
• Sneaky elixir increases stealth. Look for critters with "quiet" in the description like a sunset firefly.
• Tough elixir increases defense. Look for critters with "defense" in the description like a rugged rhino beetle.

Degrees of effect elixirs

These elixirs have levels of effect. The lowest level heat resistance will only help in a moderately warm area, while the highest level will protect you in the hottest areas of Hyrule. This means that your ingredient choices are a lot more complicated.

You can get a powerful elixir for a short period of time with four critters and one monster part, or a weak potion for a long period with one critter and four monster parts.

• Chilly elixir grants heat resistance. Look for "cool" or, obviously, "heat-resistance" in the critter description like a winterwing butterfly or a cold darner.
• Electro elixir grants resistance to shock damage. Look for "electricity" in the critter description like the electric darner.
• Enduring and energizing elixirs restore stamina or increase max stamina. Look for critters with "stamina" in the description like a restless cricket or a tireless frog.
• Hearty elixir and fairy tonic restore health and increase maximum health. Look for "hearty" or "heal" in the critter description like a hearty lizard or fairy.
• Spicy elixir grants cold resistance. Look for "warm" or "resist cold" in the critter’s description like the summerwing butterfly or warm darner.