The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

• Need to pass time waiting for something? Drop a pile of Wood and a piece of Flint on the ground, and slash it with a metal-bladed weapon. Instant Campfire! This is very useful if you're caught in a rainstorm and can't climb to where you need to go, since you can advance time forward and skip the rainstorm.

• Take the Old Man's advice and head on to Kakariko Village before doing anything else. You'll run into some upgrade systems for improving your inventory space, and the Shrine in the middle of the Duelling Peaks will give you a bandanna that improves your climbing speed.

• Go to Hateno Village ASAP as well, because you can upgrade your Runes at a place there in exchange for Ancient Parts.

• It can be tricky surviving in cold areas for long periods of time. As you'll quickly learn, some recipes and equipment are great for this purpose, but a fire helps, too. If you're holding a lit torch or a weapon enchanted with flame, it'll keep you warm in cold climates. Just remember that you can't run, climb, glide, or swim without putting out the torch. If you need to find a flame-enchanted weapon, the stables south of Kakariko have a lead on one that can last you quite a while.

• If you want a good horse right off the bat, follow the road west to the stables just NW of the Great Plateau (the big building with a giant horse head on the roof). Do the sidequest there, and bring a shitload of Stamina potions with you.

• Don't wear metal in a thunderstorm. Take it off or take a bolt to the head. If you see flickers of lightning around Link, you've got metal on.

• Yes, you can probably do that crazy thing you're thinking of to that hapless Moblin/Lizalfos/Wizrobe. Try it.

• You can't buy weapons or shields, you can only loot them off the ground or find them in chests.

• Drop your first upgrade into a Stamina boost rather than a heart, it'll help with getting around early on.

• Diamonds are useful and shouldn't be sold, any other kind of gem is fair game.

• Korok Seeds are needed to upgrade your inventory space for weapons, shields, and bows. The price goes up for each individual category independently from the others.

• Most Korok 'puzzles' are rock related. Look under out-of-place rocks, finish rock formations with another rock, see a rock formation jutting out of the water? Hurl a rock in the center.

• Dive/fall into the center of lily-pad formations for more hidden Koroks.

• Can't reach a Korok challenge ring in time? Try shield surfing.

• You can give dogs treats and in return they will dig up a little reward for you.

• There's a few armor pieces that can only be gained by helping people or by completing certain shrines.

• There's a few shrines that require use of shadows/time of day before they can be opened.

• There will be an icon next to the names of shrines where you've opened all available chests.

• Hateno Village has a special horned statue that will allow you to swap heart containers and stamina vessels. You can start the quest by talking to the boy near the entrance of the village.

• You can find rice and grain by cutting grass.

• When the time comes where you're curious to how many heart containers are needed, it's 13.

• After you complete a shrine and accept the spirit orb, wait until the moment the camera starts to pan out, then go ahead and press skip. The overworld will load much much faster!

• The game treats heat resistance and flame resistance as two independent stats. Heat resistance won't help you on death mountain and flame resist won't help in the desert.

• Link's image in the pause screen shows active buffs from clothing. There's actually 2 levels to the fire/cold protection you'll want to finish bosses in their regions, a single clothing piece or elixir isn't enough on its own.

• Keep your clothing's defense rating in mind, an enemy you traded hits with before may just suddenly one-shot you in weaker environmental protection gear.

• For cooking:
  • Insects/critters go with monster parts for elixirs, food items are separate.
  • Cooked items can only provide one type of buff at a time. Multiples of ingredients providing the same buff will make it stronger and some ingredients are much more potent than others.
  • Cooked items that add temporary yellow health/stamina also fully restore health/stamina, respectively. Whether it's better to load them into one big buffer item or split them into multiple recovery items varies a bit throughout the game, but either way it's a waste to load them up with generic meat/fish/shrooms.
  • Don't neglect keeping a stock of buff-less basic food too. Since you can only have one buff at a time, it sucks having to replace a useful one with a pointless one just to recover a couple hearts.