The Fifth Divine Beast in Breath of the Wild (2024)

To start with, there are a few assumptions we have to make:

1. The kingdom of Hyrule exists on a planet, and that planet is called “Planet Hyrule.” Because, well, we have to call it SOMETHING.
2. Planet Hyrule is spherical and more or less Earth-like. I was able to collect some weak evidence supporting this Round Hyrule hypothesis (see Addendum 1). It’s possible Planet Hyrule is flat, but that would create a wholly new dynamic I’m not prepared to address (primarily because most of it would just be magic)
3. Objects in Hyrule (such as trees, animals, and fruits) are in roughly the same proportions as the corresponding objects on Earth. While the sapient races in Hyrule are unique to that world, the plants and animals are pretty much the same proportional sizes to each other as the equivalent plants and animals are on Earth, so this is a fair assumption.
4. Gravity on Planet Hyrule functions the same, with roughly the same pull as Earth’s 9.8m/s². This is reasonable because of the famous amount of effort and realism the developers brought to their physics engine: swinging, throwing, wind, rain, lighting — they even got rainbows right! They spent an enormous amount of effort making sure it mimicked real-world physics and it shows in every minute of playtime (except for the sailboats, which were clearly designed by Bugs Bunny).
5. The Sun functions the same way as our Sun, with the planet orbiting the star and day and night as a function of the spin of Planet Hyrule. The Sun does seems to fulfill the same functions as it does on Earth, with temperature swings from day to night and morning to noon (as evidenced by the fact that this game included a freaking thermometer on our HUD — with units! — that helpfully ranges from blue to red degrees Fahrenheit). Curiously, the planet seems to have a 0 degree axial tilt as evidenced by the lack of seasons, but that’s irrelevant to our story (see Addendum 2 for my thoughts on this). It’s possible the Sun is a smaller fireball that orbits Planet Hyrule, but that goes back to the Flat Hyrule scenario in which everything is just magic.
6. The Moon in Breath of the Wild is a different Moon from the one in Majora’s Mask (and, consequently, that of any game from before MM in the timeline). Y’all blew that one to smithereens so I guess this isn’t really much of an assumption.

I was never a huge fan of the Legend of Zelda games, mainly because I was terrible at them. I couldn’t get past the 8th castle in the first quest of the original NES game (never mind the second), try though I might as a child, in college, and another attempt in my early 30s. Then I tried Zelda II and got my ass kicked even harder. I tried Ocarina of Time when I was older and couldn’t even get past the first Skulltula nest. So I basically resigned myself to never being a Zelda player regardless of how much I otherwise liked them.

I gave up gaming for a while when my daughter was born, to spend my time with her, but eventually she got old enough to try out some video games, herself. So I got a Nintendo Switch, with some games for her and games for me. I got a bunch of games for Christmas that year and decided to try my hand at the remaster of Link’s Awakening.

I. Loved. It.

The big change, that I noticed, was to have a bigger emphasis on puzzles as the challenge and less on throwing a dozen freaking Wizzrobes at you and watching you die. I like puzzles! I don’t like dying.

So I tried out Breath of the Wild and, probably no surprise here, love it just as much. Since the emphasis is more on puzzles (and exploration) than overwhelming baddies, I’m doing a lot better! But, I still suck at fighting. Even a single Bokoblin at the wrong time can ruin my day. So you can imagine my frustration when I was in the middle of clearing out a Bokoblin camp and the Blood Moon hit.

Yeah, I died. Again.

Instead of throwing the controller in frustration (an especially bad idea when the controller is your entire system), I decided to play to my strengths and start trying to track the Blood Moon cycle.

On Earth, the “Blood Moon” is a fancy name for the reddish color the Moon turns during a total, lunar eclipse. When the Moon is completely in Earth’s shadow, the Sun still shines on one side of the Earth, and some of that sunlight passes through the Earth’s atmosphere. The atmosphere scatters away the higher-energy photons (like blue, which is why the sky is blue) and leaves the lower-energy photons (like red, which is why sunset is red) to pass through to the Moon’s surface. That’s why the Moon appears red — you’re seeing every Sunset around the entire planet all at once.

Operating on the assumption that the Blood Moon over Hyrule operated on similar principles, I figured I would start by tracking the Moon cycles and seeing how often the Moon is in the right location for an eclipse. (This was made a lot easier when trying to activate the Mijah Rokee shrine, which basically involved me camping at fire after fire, watching the Moon until it turned red). My observations quickly showed me two problems with that assumption.

Problem 1: Location

The first problem I noticed is that the Hylian Moon always rises exactly at sunset. This is impossible in the system where the Moon is a satellite of the Earth while Earth orbits the Sun. The only two ways to have a Moon rise at exactly the same time as the Sun sets are:

1. Have the Sun and Moon both orbiting the planet at the exact same distance exactly opposite each other. This violates Assumption 5 and brings us back to a flat Hyrule.
2. Have the Moon and Planet Hyrule both orbiting the Sun, with the Moon at the L2 Lagrange point of the Sun-Hyrule system.

Wait, the what?

So, orbits are tricky things. Sure, they seem like neat little spheres (they’re actually oblate spheroids) moving in neat little circles (they’re actually ellipses) along the same path forever (they actually change over time). And for a planet orbiting a star, yeah, you can make those approximations and apply some high school algebra and get really good results for most of your calculations! But if you add in a third body (like a moon), things get complicated. Very complicated. So complicated, in fact, that the mathematics needed to describe them literally does not exist within the sum of human knowledge. That’s called the three-body problem, and it’s one of the most famous unsolved problems in physics.

There are certain, specific cases, though, where you can apply a solution. First, like with the Sun-Earth-Moon system, if you have the three bodies of vastly different masses from each other, you can approximate the whole thing as a pair of two-body systems (in this case, the Moon’s orbit around the Earth and the Earth’s orbit around the Sun). The other involves 5 very special points, called Lagrange points:

An object orbiting in any of those 5 points will remain there until something makes it move. (Objects trying to orbit anywhere else on this diagram will quickly be kicked out of the Earth-Sun system to form their own orbits somewhere else). As it happens, because of complicated interactions between gravity and centrifugal forces (that’s right I said it come at me), objects can naturally drift into L4 and L5 and get stuck there, as if trapped at the bottom of an imaginary valley. We call those object “Trojans,” and we’ve got at least one following our planet around right now.

Objects in L1, L2, and L3 are in an unstable orbit, as if perched at the top of an imaginary hill. It’ll stay there as long as it’s allowed to, but it doesn’t take much to bump it out of that place and send it off on its own. This generally means that, if you find something at one of those three points, it’s probably because somebody put it there. (I did a calculation on how big the Hylian Moon would have to be if it’s at L2 — see Addendum 3). So the Moon over Planet Hyrule is probably an artificial satellite.

Problem 2: Light

The second problem I noticed is that, in spite of the fact that the Moon is essentially a stationary object in space, it still has phases! For those of you who aren’t aware, here’s how Moon phases work here on Earth:

In the above image, the inner orbit shows the Moon at various points in its orbit, with the Sun-facing half always lit up. The outer images show what the Moon looks like from Earth. Depending on where the Moon is, we only see a varying fraction of the lit-up face at any given time. A full Moon is when the Moon is opposite the Sun and thus we see its entire face.

Since the Hylian Moon is always opposite its Sun, we should always have a full moon. That’s clearly not the case, as any player knows. In the below image, you can see that even though it’s only about an hour or two after sunset, the Moon is rising on the horizon and is in its “waxing crescent” phase.

If the moonlight was, like our moonlight, just reflected sunlight, then that Moon should either be a full Moon rising at that time, or a waxing crescent Moon rising shortly after the Sun does (and setting shortly after the Sun does). From this we can easily conclude that the Hylian moonlight is not, as it is here on Earth, reflected Sunlight.

With no other obvious sources of light around, the only conclusion is that the Moon is emitting its own light. The only other sources of white light in this game, as far as I know, are the Guardians’ eye lasers.

That’s no Moon!

Extra Credit: The Effect

So what is it? Well there’s one more piece of evidence to analyze, and it’s what got me started on this journey in the first place: The Blood Moon itself.

There’s not much we know about the Blood Moon, other than the fact that it revives all of Ganon’s monsters. Well, and we know now that it’s not a lunar eclipse. But we DO know two things about its behavior:

1. My observations showed me that the Moon does follow the same phases as our Moon in the same order (but much faster) — going from crescent to gibbous to full and back down — and that the Blood Moon only occurs when the Moon is at full.
2. When it does happen, it’s red for the whole night but only does its thing at midnight, when the Moon is directly overhead. And when that DOES happen, it reveals one final clue:

Notice that, just before the monsters all start to revive, the Blood Moon starts causing these little red flakes to fly up from the ground. These are the same red flakes you see anytime you’re around some of Ganon’s, um, “corruption juice”? Whatever the Pools of Malice are made out of. (Now of COURSE the Blood Moon is a result of Calamity Ganon’s corruption, but there’s no harm in having a little extra confirmation).

So what is Hyrule’s Moon, then? Let’s recap:

1. It’s artificial technology, put into the L2 spot intentionally by somebody.
2. It emits its own, white light, mimicking Sheikah technology.
3. It has been corrupted by Calamity Ganon.
4. As far as we know, there’s only one of them.

The only things we know of that were built by the Sheikah, corrupted by Ganon, and unique are the four Divine Beasts.

Conclusion: The Moon is a fifth Divine Beast.

In addition to the army of Guardians and the four planet-borne Divine Beasts, the ancient Sheikah people built a third layer of protection against the eventual rise of Ganon and shot it into space. Zelda and her team never figured that out, but Ganon sure did. All that’s left are the questions of what the Moon originally was for and how the Sheikah got it up there in the first place, which we can really only speculate on.

If we assume the Moon is, in fact, the Divine Beast Vah Luna, then we can guess at its function by comparing it to the other four. When taken by Ganon, each of the four Divine Beasts pretty much seemed to fulfill the function of “be a dick to your neighbors.” Vah Luna accomplishes this by resurrecting all of the monsters nearby, therefore letting them harass wanderers who leave the safety of stables and towns. When freed from Ganon, their functions all seem to be, “fire a giant freakin’ laser beam,” which is also what the white Guardian beams all do. So Vah Luna was apparently just a giant Sheikah space laser? Either that or it was meant to resurrect soldiers fallen in battle. Maybe both? Sure, both is good.

As for how they got it up there? Well, the only ways to defy gravity that we see in Hyrule proper are through wings or propellers, which don’t work in space. I looked around a bit and didn’t see anything that would have indicated an old launchpad for a rocket, either, nor any signs of chemical fuels (except for the Ancient Furnaces, which are never used for lift). Inside the Shrines, though:

…we can see multiple examples of the fact that the Sheikah had invented some form of antigravity. So perhaps they had some sort of Vah Luna Apparatus they used to put the Moon into orbit.

So what’s up there, on the Moon? Maybe more clues will reveal themselves in the sequel. Maybe some DLC will even make it a playable level. Either way, we’ll have to wait to find out what secrets lay scattered across its surface.

Probably more damned Korok seeds.

Addendum 1: The Round Hyrule Hypothesis

There are a number of ways to prove the world is round, but many of those aren’t accessible through Breath of the Wild gameplay. Famously, Eratosthenes measured the shadows of two sticks placed hundreds of miles apart at the same time of day and year. The kingdom of Hyrule just isn’t that big, though. Link’s shadow is the same length at a given time of day anywhere I measured it from(seeFigure 8), so that can’t be used here.

Galileo was able to prove heliocentrism (a Sun-centered model of the solar system) by observing the phases of Venus and moons of Jupiter, but I’m not certain the Planet Hyrule system even has any other planets. I certainly didn’t take the time to chart all of its stars to see if any were moving, and the game doesn’t give you a telescope to look at them, anyway. Sure, there’s a telescope on top of the Hateno tech lab, but for some sad*stic reason the game doesn’t let you look through it (probably the same jerkwad designer who decided we weren’t allowed to pet the dogs — fire that guy, Nintendo), and it can’t be moved to point at the sky, anyway.

You can also look at ships disappearing over the horizon, since a round planet will have them disappearing bottom-first, but nobody is sailing anywhere in this game so there’s nothing to watch. However, we do have a raft and a long coastline, so I was able to apply this same idea.

I went all the way to the bottom of the continent, at Lurelin Village and borrowed the old guy’s raft. I sailed it out to until I could see the edge of Tingel Island, where the Kah Mael shrine is located. (And when I say “sailed,” I mean I used the Magnesis motorboat by pushing the old treasure chests up against the mast (see above re: Bugs Bunny)). I zoomed in with my Sheikah Scope and placed a map pin at the very bottom of the island. Then I sailed my way all the way up to the island — getting hammered on by Lizalfos and Octoroks the whole freaking way — and took an up-close picture. As you can see in the comparison, there does seem to be a little bit more island visible underneath the map pin as you get close. This is pretty weak evidence, since the size of the map pin isn’t consistent when compared to the landscape, but it’s the best I could do with what the game offered. If you have a better experiment that can be performed, please let me know!

Addendum 2: Planet Hyrule’s Orbit

In this section, I’m just going to start with my conclusion: Planet Hyrule has a 0 degree axial tilt, the kingdom of Hyrule is located at 45 degrees south latitude, and it is actually spinning East to West like Earth is (instead of holding still while the Sun and Moon spin overhead).

In the above image, Link is facing due north at exactly 12:00 noon (I’m assuming Hyrule has never instituted Daylight Savings Time). If the Sun is directly over the equator (which it is on the Vernal and Autumnal equinoxes), then your latitude can be found by measuring the length of your shadow and comparing that to your own height (using the “tangent” function from trigonometry). In this case, no matter where I took the screenshot from, Link’s shadow was always the same length as Link himself,andpointingsouth. A tangent ratio of 1:1 like this means the light is coming from a 45 degree angle. Thus, the kingdom of Hyrule is located at roughly 45 degrees south latitude. (Incidentally, this helps prove the system to be heliocentric, because why would a divine creator building an artificial Sun not have that Sun pass directly overhead?)

Also of note is that that angle never changes from one day to the next:

Because the Earth is tilted 23.5 degrees, the Sun seems to move in our sky as the Earth orbits around it. On the Summer solstice, the Sun is directly over the Tropic of Cancer (at 23.5 degrees north latitude). On the Winter solstice, the Sun is directly over the Tropic of Capricorn (at 23.5 degrees south latitude). Between those two dates, the Sun can be found at some point between the two.

In Breath of the Wild, the Sun’s apparent position never changes. It’s always 45 degrees north of Hyrule kingdom. The only way this is possible (again, assuming a round Planet Hyrule) is if the planet’s axial tilt is exactly 0 degrees, so that the Sun is always over the equator. While it’s unlikely for a planet to have naturally formed this way, it’s certainly not impossible. This is also why Hyrule doesn’t seem to have seasons — the temperature ranges for a given region are the same year-round (and the only way to determine a year in this case would be to map the stars, which, as I said, I haven’t done).

The last point, of Planet Hyrule spinning East to West, is evidenced by the relative positions of Gerudo Desert and Faron Grasslands.

A recent study showed that, if you reversed the spin of the Earth, the locations of deserts and forests would get all scrambled up. The reasons for this aren’t yet known, but one thing that is clear is that the direction our planet spins determines the overall humidity of various regions. It could be as simple as the fact that an eastward spin gives eastern coasts a chance to soak up the ocean humidity first, but nothing in climatology is simple. But there is a tendency to have more desert on western coasts than eastern, all other things being equal. See the southern tip of Africa, or compare Florida to California, or look at Australia’s two coasts. It’s no smoking gun, but the fact that Hyrule has the Faron Grasslands to the East and the Gerudo Desert to the West definitely fits this finding.

Addendum 3: The Size of the Moon

Strap in, because we’re gonna get mathy.

CalculatingthesizeoftheMooninvolvedseveralsteps. The first thing I had to do was compare the Moon to a known object; something for which I could measure both the apparent height from a distance and the actual height up close. And, I had to be able to compare that apparent height to the apparent diameter of the Moon. Luckily, the game provided that for me, at Moonrise, in the form of a Moblin:

As you can see, from this distance the Moon is almost exactly two Moblins tall. So how tall is a Moblin, and how tall does that particular Moblin appear?

We’ll start with the easy one. At a later point, I was able to buy the Moblin mask from Kilton, which let me stand close to a Moblin and get a size comparison. It’s not perfect, because Link hunches over when he’s wearing the mask, but it’s close enough to say that a Moblin is pretty close to 2 Links tall (I’m definitely not going to be including uncertainty in these calculations).

Using Link as a base unit of measurement, I then had to do a little trigonometry. Since I had the height of a Moblin at 2 Links, the next thing I had to calculate was how far away the Moblin in Figure 10 was. So I ran up to him.

Lucky for me, this Moblin was kinda stupid and I was able to get right on top of him before he turned around and tried to fight me. I counted it was exactly 70 running (but not sprinting) steps to run from where I was at the time of the screenshot to where he was. Then I just had to figure out how big Link’s stride is.

I did this by running around in the snow (with the snow boots on, of course!) and looking at Link’s footprints. Unfortunately, the image I got is sort of at an angle and on a slight hill, and Link is wearing that dorky Ancient Helmet that sticks way up above his head (would it have killed these people to include a ruler?!), but it’s pretty fair to say that Link’s stride is basically equal to his height. So one Link step is equal to one Link long.

This means, the Moblin was 70 Links away and 2 Links tall. Time to set up a triangle!

So the Moblin had an angular size equal to arctan(2/70), which is 1.64 degrees. Since the Blood Moon was twice that big, that means it has an angular size of roughly 3.3 degrees. For reference, our own Moon has an angular size of 0.5 degrees, or half a pinky’s width at arm’s length. So Vah Luna is freaking huge!

It’s even bigger when you account for the fact that it is not actually orbiting Planet Hyrule, but orbiting at the L2 Lagrange point. In the Earth-Sun system, that point is about 1% of the distance from Earth that the Sun is. We call that Earth-Sun distance an “Astronomical Unit,” or AU. So we would then say that L2 is 0.01AU away. Let’s assume these same numbers apply for the Sun-Hyrule system (which is reasonable: if you apply Assumption 3 to color then the Hylian Sun is probably a yellow dwarf like our Sun, and Assumptions 4 and 5 put it at roughly 1AU away). That means Vah Luna is about 1.5 million kilometers away from Hyrule, so an angular size of 3.3 degrees means the Moon is 86 thousand kilometers wide!

Well. It’s a good thing nobody tried to fire that laser.