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Blood moon rises again
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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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In Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, a "blood moon" happens every 3 or so in-game days. This is a cutscene where the sky turns red and the blood moon comes out. When this happens, all monsters you have killed in the world come back to life.
Iirc I think it's every 7 in-game days (unaffected by sleeping or resting at fires), and nearly 3 hours real-time, but when you kill enough enemies it happens automatically so if you do a lot of killing then blood moons will happen more often.
I don't think it's on any sort of timer, 7 in game days is just a coincidence afaik.
It helps the game refresh so it doesn't have as much data, about what monsters, items, etc are gone, to keep track of. It is a very clever double whammy feature that makes the game run better and more fun to play.
That is genius. I love knowing little tricks that devs use like that.
Do you know any other things of that sort?
Morrowind would just soft reboot the Xbox during load screens. I think Blood Moons are a smarter move overall as it adds to the fun and gamer knowledge that enemies have respawned etc, but the Morrowind implementation was such that the player wouldn't notice the background soft reboot, because the screen retained a static loading screen during the process.
Also Skyrim (PS3 at least), just added the info tracking the game state to the save file which made it incredibly large after many hours of playing so some found it unplayable.
That said there's evidence that most night time blood moons are scripted (i.e. for gameplay), and anything you see during the day is a "panic" one, added later in the coding timeline, for the memory free up purpose. Blood moons weren't originally planned for that (or they were maybe but timing wasn't implemented?), but they work well for it.