One of the biggest early threats you’ll have to protect yourself against is the cold weather in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Like in the previous game, the elements can be unforgiving, and if you want to survive, you’ll need to learn how to stay warm. So here are some quick tips on how to stay warm in the early game and a list of recipes and armor pieces with cold resistance in TotK.

Jump to:

• How to Stay Warm in the Early Game
• Where to find the Archaic Warm Greaves
• Cold-Resistant Armor
• Cold-Resistant Ingredients and Recipes

How to Stay Warm in the Early Game of TotK

The quickest and easiest way to stay warm is to cook up a hot meal of spicy peppers. You’ll find several spicy peppers and a Cooking Pot on the Great Sky Island during the main quest The Closed Door, either to the east of the Temple of Time by some ruins, or east of the In-isa Shrine near the entrance to the Pit Cave that also leads to the snowy mountain. Cooking five spicy peppers all together will get you a Spicy Sauteed Peppers dish and will grant you a whopping 12 minutes and 30 seconds of cold protection, plenty of time to do some initial exploring in the nearby cold regions.

Eating food is a temporary solution though, and if you’re not careful, you could find yourself without cold protection, and without the ingredients to make a meal. For this reason, you’re going to want to seek out cold-resistant clothing. Fortunately, you can find some on the Great Sky Island before you even descend down to Hyrule.

Where to find the Archaic Warm Greaves

Once you’ve survived the cold trek up the snowy eastern part of the island to the Gutanbac Shrine and gained the ability to Ascend, you can use it right outside the shrine on the wooden ledge coming from a large hollow tree trunk at the top of the mountain.

Look inside the trunk to find a small recess in the corner that holds a green zonaite chest, and open it to reveal the Archaic Warm Greaves. This item will negate any freezing effects in basic cold temperature zones, and when combined with some cooked Spicy Peppers or applicable food, will fully negate even the most frigid environments you’ll find.

Note that neither of these will give you total immunity from the cold. If you notice your temperature meter in the bottom right, every added piece of cold resistance reduces the blue danger zone a little more. The colder the environment, the more clothes you’ll need to be able to resist taking damage. But by combining the Greaves and the Spicy Peppers dish, you should be able to handle most cold regions in the game.

Cold-Resistant Armor

• Archaic Warm Greaves, found in the Great Sky Island
• Snowquill Tunic and Armor Set, sold at Rito Village in the Hebra Mountains
• Attach a Ruby to a Shield to gain immunity to cold! (Reader submitted tip! Thank you oaknshield825)

Cold-Resistant Ingredients and Recipes

If you ever find yourself short on peppers, there’s plenty of other edible options - here's a list of them and where to get them:

• Spicy Peppers are fairly common in cold regions, like the snowy area on the Great Sky Island and the Hebra Mountains.
• Warm Darner dragonflies can be found flitting around both on the sky islands and in warm areas like the Eldin Region
• Forage for Sunshrooms in other hot climates like the Gerudo Canyon.
• Warm Safflina can be found in hot regions like the Gerudo Desert

You need to cook these in a Cooking Pot, or a Portable Pot Zonai device, to get the cold-resistant effects! The trick to cold-resistant recipes is to cook more of the same ingredient together to get a longer effect. Five Spicy Peppers give you a low-level cold resistance for 12 minutes and 30 seconds, while one cooked spicy paper gives you a fraction of that.