Tears of the Kingdom – How to Farm Pristine Weapons

Pristine weapons are hard to come by in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but you’ll want to have a healthy stock of good ones for fusing with endgame materials. Thankfully, it’s possible to farm the pristine versions of the game’s best weapons, which all come with double the attack power, increased durability, and no weird corruption texture. All it takes is a little foreknowledge, and some save manipulation. Here’s how.

How to Get the Best Pristine Weapons in Tears of the Kingdom

Pristine versions of the various knightly weapons exist only in the Depths, all held by the ghostly soldiers standing on conspicuous piles of rocks. And until you approach close enough to the rock formations such that the ghost and weapon load in, what you get is still random. The instant you see the weapon, however, it locks in, and you can’t change it.

That means you can manipulate which weapon will appear with a little save manipulation. When you find a ghost soldier in the world, if it doesn’t have the weapon you want, load your most recent autosave. Hopefully, you won’t be too far away from the soldier. Approach the rocks where the ghost spawns but stop before it actually appears, then make a manual save.

At this point, you can see what weapon will spawn, and if it’s not the one you want, simply reload and repeat the process until you get the weapon you want. Note that you need to have encountered the weapon once before, but it doesn’t need to be in your Hyrule Compendium. Each ghost soldier will also have a random weapon category based on your game — where I might see a straight sword, you might see a spear, and another player might see a two-handed weapon, and so forth.

Different ghost soldiers also have different item power levels they can spawn. Some are limited only to Knight-level equipment; others go all the way up to Royal Guard level. The highest concentration of high-power spawns was in the vicinity of the Korakut Lightroot, in a section of the Depths easiest reached by taking the East Hill Chasm near Kakariko Village.

And while the ghost soldier and their provided equipment disappear once collected, they will all respawn come a Blood Moon, so if you’re in need of a restock and a Blood Moon recently occurred, head back into the Depths (it’s a terrible place, I know), and grab all the gear you need. Save manipulation is still there if it comes to that.