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The idea of completing Shrines to increase your health and stamina has carried over to The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, but it does involve an extra step after completing the shrines before you're able to get your reward.
To get an increase in your stats, you'll need to complete a total of four shrines, collecting four different Lights Of Blessing. These will be key items that can't be used right at the beginning of the game but, later on, will act as a currency to upgrade your stats.
Updated On June 20, 2023, by Joshua Leeds: Using your Lights of Blessings can be a big decision; luckily, Tears Of The Kingdom gives players the ability to respec their upgrades after progressing a bit further into the game's story. With so many upgrades possible, it's important for players to know exactly what they are working for while completing Shrines.
Lights Of Blessing And How To Obtain Them
Lights Of Blessing are items Link will obtain that hold the power of restoring his strength lost at the beginning of the game. To obtain a Light of Blessing, you'll need to complete shrines. There are over a hundred shrines to complete throughout Hyrule, and after completing a shrine, you'll be rewarded with a single Light Of Blessing. These will be stored in your Key Items and can be checked at any time.
Using Lights Of Blessing
Much like its predecessor, you'll need to obtain four Lights of Blessing before you're able to use them to increase either your total health or stamina. After obtaining four Lights of Blessing, make your way to the nearest Goddess Statue, where you'll be able to redeem these Lights of Blessing for either a single heart increase to your maximum or another slight increase to your total stamina.
There are only about a dozen Goddess Statues scattered around Hyrule, making them much more rare than shrines. There is at least one in each of the major regions, having one always be close for those not wanting to travel across the continent to increase their hearts. Thanks to the fast-travel system in Tears Of The Kingdom, it can be easy to teleport back to the nearest Goddess Statute from just about anywhere. Any Goddess Statue can be used any number of times to redeem your Lights of Blessing, and therefore not require you to find all of the statues other than for convenience while exploring the large map.
In the first area of the game, Link will be tasked with finding only three shrines before attempting to open the door in the Temple of Time. This will then give you access to the final shrine and your fourth Blessing Of Light. While you can interact with the Goddess Statue at first, you can only use it to increase your stats on your second visit after obtaining the four Blessings. For this first increase, you'll be required to increase your total hearts to four. After this, you'll be given the freedom to increase whichever stat you'd like and to visit a Goddess Statue whenever you have four Blessings of Light.
Even after using Lights of Blessing to upgrade one of your stats, you are able to change your mind later. After completing one of the temples in the game, you can return to the Lookout Landing to begin the quest that will lead you to the Cursed Statue, which will then allow you to respec your points whenever you choose to.
Maximum Amount Of Hearts And Stamina
As of now, players can upgrade Link to a total of 40 hearts in total along with three maximum stamina wheels. For the full 40 hearts, players will need to pick either the full 40 hearts or the full three stamina bars, as it is not possible to have both. Without any tricks and only Shrine upgrades, players will normally reach 38 hearts in total; this will also require you to find and complete every Shrine in the game. Using the horned statue, you can make a late-game change to reach the ultimate 40-heart goal.