Breath of the Wild modder Waikuteru is on a roll. Last week, they salvaged the glorified storage unit that is Link’s house. Now they’ve taken full control of the giant house that houses Link’s house, by which I mean Hyrule.
In a new video, Waikuteru demonstrates how a modding breakthrough allows them to edit Breath of the Wild’s overworld, meaning that it’s now possible to recreate other Zelda games within BOTW’s expansive bounds. Waikuteru has demonstrated this by dropping a chunk of Skyward Sword—the town of Skyloft—into the game, floating waterfalls and extremely specific color palette included.
In the video, Waikuteru explained how they accomplished this.
“There are four accessible worlds in Breath of the Wild: The normal overworld which you can see in the background, the world you will be warped to when entering a shrine, MainFieldDungeon (you will play in this world when trying to complete a Divine Beast or the final trial), [and] AocField (this is a new world that was added with The Master Trials DLC, better known as Trial of the Sword). The MainField... is separated into 80 map sections.”
AocField is divided up the same way, but it only uses 5 of the map’s 80 sections. “The other 75 map sections are free for us to use,” said Waikuteru. They put Skyloft into section 75 of the map and proceeded to leap off and run to other empty and occupied sections. As they did so, the game’s lighting and music rapidly changed depending on what sort of location Link was supposed to be in.
What this means, in theory (and seemingly in practice), is that the possibilities for Breath of the Wild modding are now much greater than they were before. The sky—or at least Skyward Sword—is the limit.