When you start playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom you’ll find that you only start out with 40 hearts, which quickly gets whittled down to... three hearts. While three hearts and a single stamina circle might not seem like a lot, you can increase the number of hearts and enlarge your stamina wheel in the game, and here’s how to do that permanently -- and temporarily, with Yellow Hearts!

Increasing Your Heart Containers and Stamina With Shrines

The number of Heart Containers you have represents your total life and shows how much damage you’re able to take before it’s game over. Similarly, your stamina bar is the green circle that will run out when you do activities like running, climbing, or swimming.

The easiest way to start increasing your heart containers is by completing Shrines that are scattered throughout Hyrule and the Sky Islands.

Once you find a Shrine, enter it and complete the challenge within. These challenges range from puzzles to tough enemy fights.

Once you complete the objective within a Shrine, you’ll receive a Light of Blessing. You’re going to need four of these in total each time if you want to increase either the number of Heart Containers you have or your max Stamina.

Where to Take Your Light of Blessing

Once you have four Light of Blessing from completing Shrines, you can exchange them at various Goddess statues that are located across Tears of the Kingdom. There’s a Goddess statue at the very end of the Great Sky Island, but also one in the Emergency Shelter at Lookout Landing.

Pray at the Goddess Statue and you’ll get the option of exchanging four Light of Blessing for either a Heart Container or a slight increase to your max Stamina. Each time you want to get another Heart Container or Stamina increase from the Goddess Statue, you’ll have to exchange four more Light of Blessing.

Increasing Your Heart Containers Without Shrines

One other way to increase the number of Heart Containers you have is to defeat the main bosses. There are various main bosses you’ll encounter through progressing the story, and after defeating each boss you’ll be rewarded with a single Heart Container.

How to Get Yellow Heart Containers

You can also expand your heart meter temporarily by consuming a Hearty Meal. Find these ingredients and add them to common edibles like meat or greens to boost your meter up to 38 total hearts and yellow, one-time-use-only hearts:

• Big Hearty Radish
• Hearty Radish
• Big Hearty Truffle
• Hearty Truffle

The links above will show you common locations for these ingredients, and the Materials and Resources page also contains other Hearty ingredients, as well. Also see All Recipes and Cookbook Guide and How to Make the Best Recipes.