Tears of the Kingdom injected a number of fun mechanics into Breath of the Wild’s take on the Zelda series. One such was Fusing, the ability to meld items and weapons together to increase durability and attack strength. But glitch hunters have found an even more obscene way of fusing. Introducing “Zuggling,” a relatively simply glitch that lets you combine weapons to stack all of their bonuses, making you unstoppable with the right combination.
Update 5/26/2023 9:41 a.m. ET: As of patch 1.1.2, Nintendo has stamped out multiple glitches exploits including zuggling and the notorious item duplication glitch.
Original story follows.
The latest in the long running series of classic games, Tears of the Kingdom has a remarkably robust physics system with dozens of items to manipulate, combine, and just have fun with. Players have already discovered a number of intended and unintended ways to abuse the system, but yet more broken methods are being discovered by ways of bugs and exploits. One such method lets you fuse together as many weapons as you want to turn yourself into a walking death machine, capable of beating even the mightiest of foes in a single strike.
What is Zuggling in Tears of the Kingdom?
Zuggling, where you exploit a bug with TotK’s inventory system to fuse weapons together, first started appearing on the internet as soon as four days after the game’s May 12 release date. GameSpot’s Max Blumenthal documented the glitch on Twitter, showing off multiple elemental attacks emanating from what might look like just one weapon, but is actually multiples of them fused together via a glitch.
When you’re not attacking, it simply looks like Link has both a melee weapon in his hand, and on his back. This effect persists after sleeping, resting, and even fast travel, as Echocolat demonstrates on Twitter.
You can see the bug utilized to fell a pretty tough opponents with just one absurdly powerful hit from Gameniac’s YouTube channel:
How to ‘Zuggle’, or glitch weapons together in Tears of the Kingdom
Gameniac put together a YouTube video demonstrating how to do this glitch, and believe me, it’s pretty easy to pull off (I was able to get it working after my first attempt). But as with any glitch or exploit like this, there can always be unexpected consequences, so do yourself a favor and make a clean save you can fall back to if something goes wrong.
How this exactly works is anyone’s guess, but you’ll need the following items: At least five or six bows, and multiple weapons you want to combine. Start out by placing your back against a wall. As documented in Gameniac’s video, the steps at Lookout Landing are a great place. Face the camera and draw your weapon with the Y button.
Then hit + and navigate to your bows. Drop five or six of them. Navigate to your melee weapons inventory screen and select the weapon you have equipped. Drop your equipped weapon and then equip the weapon you wish to fuse it with. Then, as fast as you can, pause and unpause. If the weapon you first dropped doesn’t return to your inventory, you’ve successfully done it.
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You should see Link with two weapons, one on his back and one his hand. Go ahead and swing with it and, particularly if you have elemental weapons (or weapons with Zonai devices like Flame and Beam Emitters fused to them), it will become obvious if you’ve pulled it off.
In my experience, it feels like fused (zuggled?) weapons can damage each other when used. They break remarkably fast, even more so than I would’ve expected them from usual use. This is especially the case it seems when you’re using elemental weapons. On the other hand, you can one shot nearly anything in theory, so you might not need that much endurance to begin with.
And yes, in case you’re wondering, this works right now, after the May 19 patch, just as the item duplication glitch has remained untouched.