Guides
How to get the Master Sword in Tears of the Kingdom
Forget 13 hearts — TotK gates the sword behind stamina, and you can pull it free the moment you qualify, no story required.
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Forget 13 hearts — TotK gates the sword behind stamina, and you can pull it free the moment you qualify, no story required.
Spoiler warning: reaching the sword touches the Dragon's Tears main quest and some of the memories about Hyrule's past. If you want those cold, wait until you've played a bit further.
The Master Sword is stuck in the head of the Light Dragon — the huge dragon you can see flying over Hyrule from the start of the game — and pulling it out only requires two full stamina wheels, not a heart count. That's the detail that trips people up: Breath of the Wild gated the sword behind 13 hearts, and Tears of the Kingdom quietly swapped the requirement for stamina instead.
You need two stamina wheels total, and they have to be the permanent kind — a temporary boost from food or an elixir doesn't count, and neither does a partial wheel. Since you start the game with one wheel, that means upgrading exactly once at a Great Fairy fountain.
Wheel upgrades cost Stamina Vessels, which you get by spending Light of Blessing earned from completing shrines: five vessels buys one extra wheel, and five vessels come from 20 Light of Blessing. In practice that means running enough shrines to bank 20 Blessings and choosing to spend all of them on stamina rather than splitting some off toward hearts. There's no other route around it — no armor set, no potion, no hidden trick skips the wheel count.
Once you have the stamina, you still need to physically reach the dragon, and there are three ways to do it:
Landing on a dragon mid-flight is the fiddly part: drop from a Skyview Tower, a floating island, or a flying construct, and time the fall so you land on its back rather than sliding off. From there you climb to the head and interact with the hilt.
Because the sword only checks your stamina wheels, nothing stops you from pulling it out long before you've made real progress on the main story — you don't need to have advanced the regional quests, met any of the Sages, or finished a single dungeon. The only prerequisite is the stamina math above, so a player who rushes shrines for stamina instead of hearts can be swinging the Master Sword unusually early. Doing so doesn't lock you out of the Dragon's Tears quest or the Deku Tree quest afterward — both remain available and still deliver their story beats — it just means you'll be experiencing those memories after already holding the sword instead of using them as the reason you went looking for it.
The Master Sword keeps its Breath of the Wild identity as the one weapon that shrugs off the game's usual weapon-breaking system. It still tracks a hidden durability meter, and once that meter empties mid-fight it disappears from your hands — but instead of shattering for good, it comes back on its own after roughly ten minutes of real time, fully charged, with no repair item or shop involved. If you're not ready to wait, switching to another weapon and continuing the fight works fine while it recovers.
As for upgrading it: there's no permanent power-up quest attached to the Master Sword itself in this game. What you can do is Fuse materials to it exactly like any other weapon — a bomb flower, a topaz, a horn from one of the tougher monsters — which adds bonus damage and a bit of extra durability for as long as that fusion holds. It's a temporary boost, not a stat change to the base sword, so once the fused material breaks off you're back to the sword's normal numbers until you fuse something new.