The Master Sword is one of the best weapons in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but even it is susceptible to the game’s gradual weapon degradation.
The blade doesn’t break like most weapons, but it does gradually lose its power and has to recharge. However, players have found a way to circumvent this with a combination of glitches. So if you want to keep Link’s iconic sword swinging at all times, read on, but be warned, the series of glitches is pretty elaborate, and has a significant margin of error. So while it might sound nice to have an unbreakable Master Sword, the whole operation is so intricate that I would not blame you for giving up and getting back to the game.
How can I make the Master Sword unbreakable in Tears of the Kingdom?
YouTuber KnightPohtaytoe has compiled all the information Zelda players have found to recreate the exploit in a succinct video, but they warn that taking advantage of these glitches will take you about an hour, assuming you do it all perfectly. It requires some precise timing and two separate save files, but if you pull it off, you’ll have one of Tears of the Kingdom’s best weapons on-hand at all times.
To start the exploit, you need to reach the In-Isa Shrine on the Great Sky Island around an hour of playtime in. Inside, make a manual save, create a second save file, and play through the game’s intro just long enough to fight the Keese in the ruins alongside Zelda. The glitch essentially requires you to drop a weapon in a precise location and do some finagling with the menus so the weapon is essentially transported from one save file to the other like Link is sending equipment through time. If you do all this properly, you should find a Master Sword in your manual save named MsgNotFound.
KnightPohtaytoe’s video runs through the entire process, as well as how players pulled off a separate glitch called “zuggling” to upgrade the sword; however, that exploit has been patched out as of patch 1.12, so there are fewer steps to worry about.
The glitch is really elaborate, and I’m amazed people have the patience to bash their heads against a game long enough to break it like this. But Tears of the Kingdom has really inspired a lot of that creativity and exploitation with its open-ended systems.
[Update: 5/26/23 10:01 a.m. ET] Nintendo has issued a new patch for Tears of the Kingdom that addresses several glitches, including zuggling, which is used in the featured video. While the Master Sword glitch itself still seems intact, the method players have used to upgrade it is obsolete now. This post has been updated to cut information which is no longer applicable.