Getting the Master Sword in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom feels great. After dozens of hours of dealing with ugly fused weapons and broken gear, you finally get the sword of legend. But it’s still far from perfect. While it can’t break, it can lose its power and have to recharge. The Master Sword from the game’s opening prologue doesn’t have that same weakness, though, and players have spent months trying to find a way to get that version instead.
That Master Sword is called MsgNotFound and players previoulsy found a way to bring it out of the confines of Tears of the Kingdom’s prologue by breaking the game with glitches shortly after it launched. Nintendo patched that method out months later, however, and diehard fans have been trying to get it back ever since. A new YouTube video (via Gamesradar) shows how. It’s not an easy process and it requires deploying dozens of glitches, but the end result is a Master Sword that you can swing as many times as you want without it ever losing its power.
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The video is by El Duende 05 and is broken into seven parts that go through each step and glitch performed in detail. The road to recovering MsgNotFound was a group effort though, with special credit to user NghtmaR3 among others whose new SLD (Save Load Dupe) exploit is the step that breaks the seal Nintendo tried to put around all of these shenanigans. The whole thing feels like one of those old History Channel documentaries of archeologists trying to recreate the building of the pyramids.
Like I said, the current method is very long, requires an intricate stacking of game-logic-defying bugs, and is easy to mess up. Doing so will either force you to start over early on in the process or potentially nuke your end-game save, since one of the key things going on here is transporting the MsgNotFound Master Sword from one file to another. One phase revolves around stacking auto saves. Another has you fall through the bottom of the world. It’s almost like players are time traveling into the past and ripping the item out of its reality and taking it back with them between separate files. It’s one of the wildest things I’ve ever seen people try to pull off in a game.
Here’s how El Duende 05 describes the final steps in Tears of the Kingdom glitch jargon: “Transfer both a shield and weapon to prologue to unlock those inventories 2) Place a portacull shield in position near Ganon 3) Set up LSW next to the map origin 4) Cull Link while lifting an object 5) Navigate between dimensions with no abilities to arrive at Ganon in the prologue 6) Send the sword back to your future self.” Or you can reference the entire written guide here.
This complex method works for 1.2.1, the current version of Tears of the Kingdom which Nintendo graciously hasn’t patched since last August. Some players simply never updated their game and got the MsgNotFound Master Sword using the old method. Others are waiting for a more streamlined version of the latest method to be discovered before giving it a go themselves. El Duende 05 said they expect one will be found soon enough. Hopefully, that happens before Nintendo decides to drop a new update out of the blue. We all deserve an unbreakable Master Sword in our lives.