How to Trigger a Blood Moon in Tears of the Kingdom (TotK)

You can easily spend hours traveling across Hyrule in Tears of the Kingdom and never truly run out of things to do. There’s always a new chest to be found, a sidequest to discover, or more monster packs to kill. And that latter activity can be easily a lifelong job considering that anytime a Blood Moon comes around, monsters will inevitably come back around the world.

It sounds frustrating at first, but it’s definitely one of the game’s best mechanics as it always keeps some areas with renewed drops and refilled with opponents whenever you need to gather some of their drops. Blood Moons don’t look as bad anymore, right? Here’s how you can trigger a Blood Moon in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

How to Get a Blood Moon in Tears of the Kingdom

Unfortunately, you cannot manually trigger a Blood Moon in the game. Just like in its predecessor game, Blood Moons are fixed events in Tears of the Kingdom that occur roughly every 168 minutes of real-life playtime, or simply every 2h48 minutes (a complete in-game week). Unfortunately, there’s no special ritual to immediately trigger it.

So the best you can do is to resume your regular play while waiting for the global reset. There are hundreds of different things to do in this game, anyway. But if you don’t feel like playing right now but you need a Blood Moon, you can simply leave your Switch plugged in with the game running while you do anything else. Come back a few hours later and your Moon will have already happened.

Related: Where to Get Crystallized Charges in Tears of the Kingdom

There’s no in-game timer for the Blood Moon, so you gotta keep track of it yourself. Blood Moons will rise at midnight and feature a cutscene with Zelda narrating what’s happening. You can skip it by pressing X since it gets really repetitive after a few times.

What Are The Blood Moon Benefits In Tears of the Kingdom?

Bloon Moons act as a complete reset for the open world. Monsters will respawn and weapons you picked up in certain areas will appear once more, letting you kill the same creatures again for extra mats and helping you keep your arsenal ready for new battles. Chests aren’t refilled though.

Aside from that, there’s also the hidden Blood Moon special cooking buff. If you cook anything after 23:30 on a Blood Moon day you’ll get an extra success rate, so this is the best time to stock up on food for your upcoming monster slaying. You can learn various recipes here and there, so that’s a lot useful.