Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom players spent 870 hours completing every shrine and exploring the entirety of Hyrule to create eerily beautiful footprint map

A Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player has shown a look at their map after spending 870 hours exploring the entire game and completing every shrine.

In a recent post, Twitter user NightGames834 shared “the footprints of about 870 hours of walking aiming to complete all the shrines and explore all the areas.” The result is a map of Hyrule almost entirely covered in the neon green lines that denote the route that Link took across the kingdom on his most recent adventure.

There are some obvious clusters of activity around some areas of the map, but other parts are somewhat hypnotic, the lines that NightGames trod gently weaving in and out or gently crossing over each other. 

A couple of parts of the map, however are pretty empty – that’s because the footprint data stored by Tears of the Kingdom eventually begins to run out, erasing early routes to replace them with newer ones. According to NightGames, that’s why the Plateau of Beginnings and the Korok Forest are the biggest gaps on their map – they visited both of those areas relatively early in their playthrough, so by the time they took this screenshot, the prints had disappeared.

This is far from the first time we’ve seen such a mammoth time investment into Tears of the Kingdom, and it likely won’t be the last. Earlier this year, one player spent 1,885 collecting Poe, while another is 1,500 hours into a potentially years-long quest to manually hit the cap for every single material in the game. Just like Breath of the Wild before it, it seems that Tears of the Kingdom has a very long lifespan ahead of it.

At the other end of the spectrum, one Tears of the Kingdom streamer hit a roadblock just six hours into their own challenge run.