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Just over a year ago, superfan Bobby Blue Holliday turned heads in the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom community with a 1,500-hour status report on his quest to "manually cap all materials" in the game by running countless routes around Hyrule while hoarding everything in sight.
He is still at it. And he's made some impressive progress. In a recent Reddit post, and through a video shared with GamesRadar+, Holliday crossed the 80% collected mark some 3,660 hours into this grind. 206 out of 251 materials have been completed. His inventory is an endless scroll of fruits, meats, fish, ores, monster parts, and Ultrahand gizmos beyond the dreams of avarice. His world map shows a movement heat map so well-worn that you've got to imagine Link has physically carved ruts into the land with footsteps alone.
Holliday has the receipts to back up his dupe-free quest – regular social media posts sharing screenshots and highlight clips from his adventures. He also has the added "perfect alibi" of a girlfriend who "I promise you is very, very, very tired of hearing about it."
We've seen players take on enormous material grinds in Tears of the Kingdom before, but Holliday's quest is on another level.
3,660 hours from r/TOTK
"Are you ok?" one Redditor understandably asked him after his latest update.
"Good question. I'd like to know the answer as well," Holliday replied.
"But why… I can send you grass if ya need it," queried another stunned onlooker.
"Cause it would be weird to have done this with every Zelda game except Tears?"
I mean, obviously.
Holliday tells me that he usually puts three to six hours into this Tears of the Kingdom collection each night. "Insomnia's got a pretty tight grasp on me, so at least I'm blessed with something to occupy my racing mind with," he says. "If not Tears of the Kingdom, I spent it drawing or exercising."
3,600 hours is a lot of time. Plenty of time to learn Tears of the Kingdom's map like the back of your hand and, surely, optimize the daylights out of an item route. But Holliday says you can only optimize so much; eventually it comes down to sheer determination.
"Sometimes, I wish there WAS a way to speed up the grind, but sadly over half the mats in Tears are set to a world clock before they respawn, and beings such as dragons require a 10-minute waiting period before reactivation," he explains. "Thankfully, demon materials can be 'restocked' via waiting for Blood Moons every 2 1/2 hours, OR if you're like myself, and don't have time like that, you can force trigger a Blood Moon instead by shooting opals at blue rock walls within caves."
I am a war machine from r/tearsofthekingdom
Mercifully, some items have very low item caps, like king scales or fairies. Previously, Holliday said Stealthfin Trout had become a headache. He's battling a new one now.
"Electric Lizalfos tails are by far the most tedious and require save scumming for drops, otherwise, you're looking at anywhere between a 5-37% chance at a drop depending on how they're taken out according to a Reddit post I found. They (Electric Lizalfos) also don't travel in packs very often unlike their elemental cousins, whose material acquisition went by significantly faster (I almost miss them). Other than that, attempting to pinpoint the weakest variant of demon a player typically plows through early game becomes more challenging due to the world state leveling up alongside Link, thus turning red demons into blue, white and silver foes."
The irony that Holliday doesn't "have time like that" but does have time for this is not lost on me, I assure you. I asked, once again, what keeps him going.
"I made a promise that I'd be the first player to manually cap all materials," he tells me. "You'll find me to be a man of my word."
