Gloom is a new phenomenon of sorts in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that reduces your maximum hearts if you come in contact with it. This ominous black and red sludge infects the ground and even the enemies over the expanse of the Depths– making it an exceedingly dangerous area to deal with. So if gloom’s got you down, there are luckily quite a few ways to heal from gloom damage and even resist it.

How to Heal from Gloom Damage

First, a quick primer on gloom:

• Once all your hearts are depleted by gloom, it’s Game Over.

• Standing on gloomy ground for two seconds will reduce your maximum health by one, noted by a gray, cracked heart container. Getting hit by a gloomed enemy will also reduce your maximum health- the stronger the enemy, the more they’ll deplete in one hit. This doesn’t necessarily damage your regular health, though.
• Gloom will reduce your maximum heart containers whether they’re filled or not. So if you’re missing some health, but only being damaged by gloom, the gloom will have to get through those containers before they can deal a killing blow.

• However, some gloom enemies can still deal normal damage - like with fire arrows! So be aware if you’re low on health regardless.

You might discover the first method of fixing your lost maximum health during the Camera Work in the Depths Main Quest.

Simply put, stepping foot beneath a Lightroot –the Depth’s fast travel points– will recover your maximum health.

The other easy, free method is to fast travel back to the surface. Both methods will leave your newly recovered heart containers empty though, so be ready with health-restoring food to get back to tip-top shape.

It’s not always convenient to have to fast travel away from whatever you’re doing whenever you need to heal up, so it’s always handy to have the third way of gloom recovery on hand: Sundelions.

When used in cooking, Sundelions restore maximum health depleted by gloom. You can usually find a couple of these golden flowers on each Sky island way up high.

Know that, like the other methods, Sundelions, when cooked alone, only fix your empty containers, and don’t actually refill the lost health unless you cook them with another material that does, like meat. And like all meals, the more ingredients, the better it works.

How to Resist and Prevent Gloom

That’s all you need to know about healing the gloom, but what about preventing it altogether? Hopping on gloom doesn’t do anything to extend the time it takes until infection–unless you’re able to get a paraglide off. But that’s really not reliable or effective, like some other methods.

A certain material called Dark Clump can be cooked with food to produce gloom-resistant meals. The blue-outlined heart containers represent the number of times you can essentially absorb gloom, but only from the environment.

Enemies will still hit you directly where it hurts, but still, it’s useful for getting around. You can buy Dark Clumps from the Bargainer Statue at Lookout Landing–and other locations in the depths–in exchange for Poes, the blue flame things. There’s also a spooky enemy that drops them, but we won’t spoil that.

Finally, you can also, eventually, purchase a Gloom Resistant Depths outfit from the Bargainer Statue once you’ve located enough of them, for a price. However, we haven’t found any way to resist gloom from enemy attacks. Not yet, at least!