Giant Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Infinite Item Glitch Shatters Its Economy [Update]

Players have discovered a new duplication glitch in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, that lets you infinitely duplicate almost all of the items in your inventory, from diamonds to star fragments. It completely breaks the game’s economy. Here’s how to do it.

[Update 5/19/2023 10:05 a.m. ET: Nintendo released Tears of the Kingdom’s first post-launch patch overnight, but fortunately the infinite item glitch still works in version 1.1.1. The update addressed a progress bug for the Closed Door quest and introduced some other vague fixes. Hyrules economy, at least for now, remains in an inflationary spiral thanks to free diamonds and rubies.]

Unlike some of the glitches in Breath of the Wild, the latest duplication glitch in Tears of the Kingdom is both simple and pretty straightforward to pull off. It also lets you clone way more than just new weapons. All it requires is that the item you want to duplicate can be stuck to an arrow and that you have two bows in your inventory. You can do it anytime, anywhere, and if you mess up—don’t worry, you won’t lose the item you were trying to duplicate.

The steps are as follows:

1. Pull out you bow
2. Press up on the D-pad and attach the item you want to duplicate to it
3. Press start to open your inventory
4. Drop the bow you have equipped
5. Equip a new bow
6. Press start two times as quickly as possible to close and re-open the menu
7. Drop the bow you have equipped
8. Close out of your inventory screen
9. Pick both of the bows you dropped back up

If it worked, you now have two of the item you tried to duplicate. If it didn’t, simply try again. The only hard part about this glitch is the timing of closing and re-opening the inventory screen. It has to be really fast. The idea seems to be to get Link to drop both bows within the same animation, seemingly stacking them and tricking the game in some way into thinking both have the item on the arrow.

But once you’ve mastered the glitch, the sky’s the limit. Almost anything can be attached to arrows, from cooking ingredients and monster parts to rare gems and Zonai devices. Diamonds, for example, sell for 500 rupees apiece. Tears of the Kingdom’s economy is much stingier than Breath of the Wild’s, so the easy money comes in handy.

Rare monster parts like Black Horns and Gibdo Bones are also super useful since they can now be fused with weapons to greatly increase their strength. Duplicating them is an easy way to never be short on powerful swords, or potent elixir-mixing ingredients for that matter. Or you could be like me and just stuff your pockets with dozens of Zonai rockets to craft all kinds of absurd war machines.

If you don’t want to go hog wild with the glitch, it still might be nice to pad your inventory with extra copies of a few of your rarer items. If Breath of the Wild’s update history is any indication, this glitch won’t be around for long. Though at the rate duplication tricks are popping up in new Switch games these days, it probably won’t be long until the community finds other ones as well.