A new duplication glitch has been discovered in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in less than two weeks after its release. Tears of the Kingdom is the latest release in The Legend of Zelda series and has been resoundingly well-received as the follow-up to Breath of the Wild which released in 2017. As of writing Tears of the Kingdom only trails Breath of the Wild by 2 points on Metacritic, with the games holding impressive scores of 95 and 97 respectively. It has been speculated that Tears of the Kingdom may be highly influential when it comes to future open-world games.
Like most open world adventure games, Tears of the Kingdom has a boatload of items to collect, each with varying degrees of rarity. The new Ultrahand mechanic introduced in Tears of the Kingdom allows players to combine items or control objects found in the overworld, gluing them together to build all kind of zany contraptions.
A Reddit user by the name of heeissenberg shared a new duplication glitch for Tears of the Kingdom that has been dubbed the Shield Hop method. All players have to do is execute a Shield Hop, bring up the inventory, make Link hold 5 of whatever items they want to duplicate, and then press B and Y at the same time. The glitch works as of the latest Tears of the Kingdom patch which was released three days ago, bringing the game up to version 1.1.1.
Many gamers are opposed to using this kind of duplication glitch since it makes items that would otherwise be difficult to come by trivial at best. Some of the comments on heeissenberg's Reddit post describe a similar method using paragliding instead, and this is reportedly a more efficient Tears of the Kingdom duplication glitch. It's difficult to say that duplication isn't a somewhat game breaking glitch, and it's likely that it will be patched out sooner or later.
Tears of the Kingdom is one of the most well-received games of 2023, but one would be hard-pressed to call it a perfect game. One of the points that has drawn some contention is the map traversal in Tears of the Kingdom. The game has a massive world, and it can be an arduous task to get from one point of the map to another, so it might be tempting for players who are a little strapped for time to make use of this duplication glitch for some kind of reprieve.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available exclusively for Nintendo Switch.