Mapping the Rivers of Hyrule: Uncovering the Hydrological Secrets in Tears of the Kingdom
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Introduction
In the wondrous world of Hyrule, fans of the Legend of Zelda franchise have often noticed a peculiar phenomenon: despite the presence of numerous rivers, none seem to connect to the ocean. How can this be? With rivers, lakes, and waterfalls strewn throughout the land, it raises intriguing questions about the hydrological design of Hyrule.
In this article, we'll embark on a journey to explore these rivers. We will map their pathways, investigate their sources, and analyze the connections between them, all while examining the changes from Breath of the Wild to the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. Furthermore, we’ll explore whether any of this resonates with real-world hydrology.
The Mysterious Waterways of Hyrule
An Overview of Hyrule's Rivers
- Intriguing Observation: While traversing Hyrule, you'll encounter many water bodies; yet, strikingly, they all seem isolated. This oddity prompts curiosity about their ultimate fate.
- Mapping the Routes: We will trace a notable river system starting from the Great Plateau, identifying tributaries and lakes along the way.
Section I: Beginning at the Great Plateau
Initial Journey Downstream
Let’s kick off our exploration on the Great Plateau, a prime candidate for establishing a river that might flow to the ocean. Starting here provides a clear pathway for our river mapping exercise, leading us through different terrains and hydrological features.
- Raft Ride: Using a raft as our vessel, we’ll follow the river’s course, navigating through waterfalls and lakes.
- Documenting Features: As we trace our path, we'll mark every pond, creek, and the direction of each water feature we encounter.
Section II: The Role of Caves in Hyrule Hydrology
Discovering Underground Rivers
Exploring the tributaries reveals a fascinating aspect: many rivers in Tears of the Kingdom are sourced from caves that didn't exist in the original game.
- Dynamic Changes: This transformation indicates that some rivers weren't present in Breath of the Wild. Instead, they now connect various water bodies through underground networks.
- Caves as Water Informants: The caves play a pivotal role in understanding Hyrule’s current hydrological state and how it's evolved since the first game.
Section III: The Lake Conundrum
Lakes Without Outflows
Upon reaching a mysterious lake fed by three tributaries but with no visible outflows, questions arise:
- End of the River System?: Is it possible that all these rivers converge into a single ‘dump zone’? This hypothesis invites further exploration.
- Exploring Further: We choose to investigate the tributary entering from the West to discover its source and flow direction.
Section IV: The Impact of Change in Hyrule
Environmental Transformations
Traveling upstream, we notice significant shifts from Breath of the Wild to Tears of the Kingdom that suggest an evolving ecosystem:
- Bifurcations: There are multiple instances where rivers bifurcate, complicating the routes water takes. This encourages us to question whether these changes are purely natural or a result of human interference (possibly the royal family’s actions).
- Flood Plains: The discovery of flood-prone regions within Hyrule indicates that the land has been significantly molded by water flow over time.
Section V: Connections Between Water Bodies
The Inter-Connectedness of Hyrule's Waters
By carefully navigating the river paths, we uncover numerous connections:
- Moat Around Hyrule Castle: A maze of rivers surrounds Hyrule Castle, illustrating the complex interactions between water bodies.
- Lake Hylia as a Destination: Our explorations ultimately point to Lake Hylia as a significant destination for water, although its fate remains uncertain due to underlying geological shifts.
Section VI: Revisiting the Source
Reconnecting to the River's Origins
As we trace back to the origins of the main river, we examine the contributing factors of the hydrological system:
- The Great Wellspring: Water flows from various sources, including a waterfall from the Great Wellspring, emphasizing how interconnected these water features are.
- Elusive Waterfalls: Notably, waterfalls often spawn from the sky islands, suggesting that many of Hyrule's features may tie into a broader, fantastical water cycle.
Conclusion
In conclusion, our expedition through Hyrule's rivers reveals a complex hydrological landscape filled with intricacies, surprises, and connections that celebrate the evolution of the land between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. While we have identified potential sources and termination points of these rivers, the true beauty lies in the rich, layered storytelling that gives Hyrule its unique character.
- Connecting it All: Ultimately, understanding Hyrule’s rivers is about recognizing that they form a broader ecosystem that flows both physically and narratively throughout the game.
Whether you’re a player looking to deepen your appreciation of the game’s design or a curious observer of virtual ecosystems, this journey through Hyrule serves as a testament to the creative genius behind its construction. So, the next time you explore the rivers of Hyrule, remember this rich tapestry of intertwining water features that connect us to the magic of the Legend of Zelda.
look at this map of Hyrule and tell me what you see I'm just kidding I'm going to tell you what I see I see a bunch of
rivers and no matter how hard I look none of them and I mean none of them connect in any way to the ocean have you
ever noticed that I'm serious there's tons of water in this game but every place on the edge of the map that looks
like it might be the end of a river it's not not this place not this place not that place or this place this is an
interesting question because all of this water has to go somewhere even if it just goes off the map or disappears
there will be an end to it but if it doesn't go to the ocean where does it go and maybe more interestingly How does it
go figuring out the answers to those questions is simple we're going to find a river and follow it all the way from
where it begins to where it ends mapping out every Pond Lake stream and other river that touches it as well as marking
which direction each one flows and how they all connect and also how the landscape has changed from breath of the
wild to tear of the kingdom and maybe just for fun uh whether or not any of this has its roots in real world
hydrology it's going to be easy let's begin with a quick science fact shall we did you know statites like this are
usually formed via a multi-step process involving rainwater mixing with carbon dioxide to make a gentle acid that
dissolves Limestone and carries it down through the stoil through the ceiling of a cave depositing uh that same Limestone
into a dripping shape that gradually builds up over time I learned that on the internet but if I use
expressvpn now nobody knows who learned it on on the internet I'm Anonymous welcome to the sponsorship uh if you're
not aware a VPN is a virtual private Network it's a multi-use tool that's primarily used to uh obfuscate your
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criminals let's imagine a world where James Cameron has his own streaming service called James Cameron plus and
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the content I'm paying for including the Matrix The Matrix Reloaded The Matrix but Austin if you use a VPN that just
means the VPN company knows that you were looking up stag tight facts instead of your ISP knowing that you were
looking up stag tight facts wrong expressvpn does not and in fact cannot keep logs if you're browsing data
because their servers are built to run exclusively on RAM I don't really know what that means cuz I'm not a nerd but
it sounds pretty good to me go to expressvpn.com Austin uh to get an extra 3 months of expressvpn free easy the
link below if you're interested thanks everyone thank you expressvpn now where should we start this River mapping
journey I think we're going to start on top of the great Plateau because the map at least makes it look like a really
strong candidate for creating a long um ocean bound river that will flow for miles and miles without stopping and
that should make for a nice easy Journey looking Downstream across the map it's clear that it won't be the the simplest
uh River diagram that we've ever constructed but at least starting all the way at the beginning will help make
things a little bit more straightforward okay welcome to the start of this river right here next to this funny little
cave we're going to be using this raft like Huckleberry fin to go uh basically just to follow the river all the way
down to wherever it goes including it looks like over a gigantic waterfall which is fine now in order to keep track
of all these places that we're going we're going to be making a river diagram just like we did for Skyrim and that
diagram is going to be built with a long straight line in the middle just to present the uh the main path of the
river and then we're going to use a variety of symbols like these to denote uh different hydrological features so
you'll note that we've gone over a waterfall and into a lake and it looks like uh we're going over another
waterfall presumably into another gigantic Lake oh this is a big waterfall Jesus Oh after taking myself over two
different waterfalls eventually I ended up in this very deep Canyon uh with a deep almost Eerie lake at the bottom of
it the flow of the river had already come to a halt which isn't necessarily a huge problem but it does mean that we
have to circumnavigate the lake in order to figure out where the next part of the river branches off coming around to the
north side there's a waterfall flowing into the lake then there's another one from the West also flowing into this
Lake add to that the one we came in on and that's three waterfalls all flowing into the lake and nothing flowing out of
it now if a lake has three rivers flowing into it and no Rivers flowing out of it then that lake is the end
point of those river systems so it's entirely possible that we found the answer answer to our question already
every river you've ever seen in this game might just dump itself into this weird dark shadowy Lake but something
about that doesn't feel quite right this map is riddled with water features and I'm not comfortable saying that this is
high rules aquatic dump zone until I know for sure and there's only one way to find that out we'll tackle the
waterfall coming in from the West first because it looks like that one doesn't actually go anywhere so we should be
able to just head to the top take a look and then Mark it down one of my biggest Curiosities for this game was how it
decides to handle what we call uh randomly spawning waterfalls which are a necessity for any video games hydrology
Skyrim would just have water like U materializing out the side of a flat texture and previous selda games for
example Twilight Princess they had really strange these really weird ugly spouts of water built into the cliff
fed by a cave it's not even a trick I mean it's probably a trick once we actually look back into it but who would
have thought this introduces another interesting wrinkle tears of the Kingdom as most people know is a direct sequel
to 2017th breath of the wild and it reuses the same broad Strokes geography of that older game while adding a
variety of new locations towns and features like floating islands in a giant underground demon land uh one of
the biggest and most consequential additions to this game at least in my opinion are the caves breath of the wild
the first game did not have caves so what you're looking at right here could not have existed in breath of the wild
and following these rivers in the sequel is going to highlight for us one of the main ways Nintendo utilized those new
caves they used them as underground rivers that connect two disparate bodies of water so when we look at this giant
map and all of these unconnected rivers and lakes suddenly things aren't so clear anymore because these two spots
are actually connected even though at first glance they didn't look like they were this also means that anytime we see
a body of water in Te of the Kingdom that's fed by a cave like this one that body of water either just didn't exist
at all and breath of the wild or they had some sort of uh alternative solution to where it was sourced from I'll do my
best anytime there's an interesting uh example of this I'll be sure to show you a side-by-side comparison but first
let's just get this little tributary mapped out and then we'll come back and do that this river goes uh through the
cave up a series of really lovely little stair-like waterfalls and is ultimately fed by another waterfall that itself
causes a separate small Creek to form heading in the opposite direction that Creek just sort of Peters out into this
odd and unremarkable little corner here but if you follow that waterfall up you will find yet another cave uh from which
this river is ultimately fed inside that cave is a large space notice how the water is also clearly made to just flow
straight and doesn't actually animate around the little island in the center of it all also if you wander too far
you'll end up facing a stone Talis which is no big deal if you've played the game as much as I
have very funny Austin very funny now as we said all of this really does beg the question if this entire river system
that we just looked at is sourced from caves and caves did not exist in the map when it was originally made in 2017's
breath of the wild where were these Rivers sourced back then the answer is really really neat they weren't the
waterfall going into the lake just didn't exist the rivered flowing in step-like fashion was just a smooth dirt
path there was no additional waterfall no cave nothing the vibe of this area is so different from one game to the next
that my brain didn't honestly recognize it as the same place at first glance another point of interest for this
tributary is that this river flows through a canyon that if you look on the map looks like it was clearly carved by
water at some point in the past so in some ways you could almost see uh tiar of the Kingdom as just a different state
of seasons for Hyrule also consider the fact that a lot of the smaller bodies of water around here like spectacle Rock
have dried up significantly since the previous game in the series is it possible that some sort of lowercase sea
climate change don't get worked up has caused these ponds to dry up and also maybe created record snow melt in the
grudo highlands which seeped into the groundwater eventually cutting a path for itself down to the lake that we came
from I have no idea I'm not a hydrologist by the way always be sure to look down in the top comments because
usually someone with way more knowledge than me will have corrected all the stuff I said wrong so you shouldn't
believe uh comments you definitely shouldn't believe YouTubers we don't know what we're talking about now with
that small uh tributary marks down we can start tracing the main river back to its source up the waterfall on the north
side of the lake we end up in another Valley but it's a little tough to tell which way the water is actually flowing
here sort of funny considering how there's a gigantic waterfall uh right there but hey you know they did their
best following this Valley backwards we oops uh we run into another offshoot Creek which is Downstream of us rather
than Upstream it's not overly complicated and it just flows into this big lake that surrounds the Coliseum
there sort of splitting around the sides of it a little further Upstream we run into this the sage temple ruins just off
the right hand side here are flat lands so low to the water table that they are flooded but they do have ruins built
onto them which means at some point in the past they weren't flooded as we travel further Upstream we're going to
see a lot of these low-lying areas that are either actively flooding or clearly at risk of flooding which sort of
indicates that a lot of the center of Hyrule is what we might call a flood plane there are some pretty stunning
photographs from James Stanfield for National Geographic of some flood planes in Mongolia that bear a striking
resemblance to some places you might find in this iteration of Hyrule flood planes like this are often carved up by
the rising and falling Rivers which if you look at the map at the center of Hyrule here makes a lot of sense it
really does sort of look like it was carved up in all sorts of ways over many years coming up past these ruins we have
another pretty sizable river that flows Westward to the heart of Satori Mountain this one seems weird to me because while
the flow is pretty weak it does flow from east to west but this channel is at the heart of a really large really snowy
mountain and if our earlier conjecture was true then you'd think that snow would have melted off to create this
channel flowing from west to meet the larger River uh back to the east when you follow this River back to to its
source you even see an underground river inside of a cave that's been cut off from the main river presumably due to
Drought to me this screams snow melt and underground channeling caused a river to form as we all are always screaming uh
but according to the game this is the downstream cave so it even says in the game this is Downstream even more
baffling is that if you go into that cave you can literally see groundwater dripping out of the ceiling so the tools
are all there maybe they just named it wrong uh but this is going to be one of many weird examples of Nintendo either
doing things that are extremely nuanced and hydrologically impressive or really really weird and hard to explain which
is honestly exactly what you want out of a video game speaking of weird things further up River uh things are fairly
straightforward until we hit Hyrule Castle the river gets really strong right around here presumably due to evil
Goblin magic or you know whatever uh and it splits off into loads of weird directions forming a sort of moat around
the castle this is where the complexity of this task really started to hit me way way wa wait wait but then this goes
single river is connected almost that's what it feels like I I think literally all every single river is connected to
everything else so mapping One River it necessitates that I map the entire game the biggest piece of confusion is right
here why does the river split off and go south from the castle at all I can't think of a good explanation the best
thing I could guess is that this means that this moat was actually man-made because a a dramatic
bifurcation like this is not very common in real Rivers we'll come back to that in a moment and past the castle further
up River we end up at yet another fork in the river where it bifurcates Southward and heads towards Lake halia
also I keep saying this word bifurcate I know it sounds like I just knew that word on account of being very
intelligent uh but I didn't I had to learn it for this video it's very important word when you're talking about
rivers a bifurcation is a point where a river splits off into two rivers that then both continue Downstream to their
own separate destinations it's similar but the inverse of the word Confluence where two rivers join up to go to the
same place from what I can tell confluences are extremely common in real life but bifurcations are pretty rare
look at this map of the Mississippi River Basin how many confluences do you see is it 3 trillion yeah how many
bifurcations do you see turns out maybe one right down here all the way at the bottom and while it's technically a
bifurcation of the Mississippi River I read an article about how this split is only maintained due to the hubris of the
Army Corps of Engineers and that in fact the atalaya Basin is actually where the Mississippi would be if allowed to run
its natural course so even this example is a little rickety and this does tend to be how bifurcations evolve they are
only semi-permanent and over time as Illustrated here the River will gradually show preference to whichever
side is deeper or steeper as it carves its path thinking back over what we've surveyed so far there have actually been
two other inexplicable bifurcations which indicates that either the land of Hyrule is full of rivers that are just
about to change course or that it's a video game and uh Nintendo did not in fact remember to hire the required team
of PhD hydrologists before making it I'll have to check the credits maybe they're in there now here's my hot Zelda
lore take not like that I think there's a chance that the entire Western portion of this River Basin was caused
unintentionally by the royal family wanting to dig a moat for their castle and it got totally out of control like
those Tik Tok videos of people digging trenches between streams and the ocean that rapidly turn into insanely
dangerous whitewater rapids and probably damage the ecology somehow I mean if this can happen in 2 minutes from a hand
dug trench imagine the chaos that would be caused if you machined a huge moat for a major river to flow through the
government is to blame as usual and believe it or not this isn't even the only instance where I think human
intervention may be drastically reshaping the landscape of Hyrule in order to show you that though first we
have to map out the rest of this bit all right so should I follow this Downstream or should I follow it Upstream to where
it actually begins I guess let's F oh but then I got to go all the way over into there all
right well let's follow this downst stream first I guess cuz that's going to take the longest at least this River's
fast there's a lot to see down this this way uh including an interesting divide between the shores where one side is
totally green and the other side is Muddy and Rocky I'm not sure what that might be about but it's interesting
hydrologists in the comments let me know on the right here is a fascinating little Al Cove with the remains of some
sort of house or cabin perhaps the first sign of civilization having to retreat from the unsuitable habitat honestly I
wonder if this was here in breath of the wild like or if it was like a regular house that then decayed in tears of the
Kingdom let me go grab my switch um the house is still here in breath of the wild as you see which is interesting cuz
you would think something that's that decayed if it had flooded a lot in the intervening years well you think
something like this wouldn't have held up but you know look at that wood that's a good wood texture right there okay so
it's a little bit of mixed environmental messaging also known as classic video game Beauty hey check this out another
bifurcation let's pull up the map and look at something neat here this river goes this way and it goes this way the
way on the right here goes into what looks like a lake at first glance but this Lake was clearly at one point
connected Downstream you can see it just in the topography and you can almost see the historical Shoreline along the edge
of the hill on the mountain side now knowing what we talked about earlier how generally when rivers split off like
this one side usually captures the river over time and becomes the only surviving Branch Nintendo may have accidentally
done a great little in progress representation of this here we can mark all of that down like this and we can
also marked on another tributary which is coming in from the east past the dueling Peaks which from what we can see
also has its own various tributaries and multiple sources for the water the end point of the main river is in Lake halia
that much is obvious from the map but I have a sneaking suspicion that there's some very interesting stuff happening
down there hydrologically oh what the hell is that so before we get to that let's just knock out this new tributary
to the east shall we the land here like so much of Hyrule is just really wet a tenno village carved itself out a little
living space on the Eastern end of the Basin uh and the main mouth of the river is just a few hundred ft down the side
uh down the side of the hill in a small Lake the waterfall coming out of the side of the mountain is adorned with a
large hole to help sort of elevate its hydrological believability but ultimately this is really the Hyrule
equivalent of our magic waterfalls at Skyrim the other offshoot Creek on this River also spawns from the side of a
rock face though with a much tighter opening that reminded me of those uh blood pressure testing machines you
could play with as a kid at the grocery store you guys ever play with those no I too have an appreciation for this extra
detail that Nintendo sort of notched into the ources of streams here but I can't quite tell whether I prefer this
thoughtfulness or the slightly uh surreal disinterest that Skyrim uses as a solution for the same problem both
definitely have their merits okay as of now our diagram looks like this and we only have two more unexplored branches
each of these branches could very well have multiple branches of their own and I'm starting to fear that this hole we
digging is less of a hole and more of a hydrological fractal it just keeps going but we're in too deep at this point to
stop and plus I'm committed to creating an animation at the end of this showing the flow of the entire river system from
source to mouth and I can't do that if I give up at this point heading back to where we split off most recently it's
finally time to go down river to Lake halia I'd like to maintain the Integrity of the present tense storytelling here
but I will warn you ahead of time if you thought Lake Kia was the end of this River just because the map makes it seem
like it is you're in for a rude awakening bucko because I'm about to drown you in amateur inferences about
the subtleties of H digital hydrodynamics that made sense for right if that sounds fun to you I think you're
going to enjoy my channel so I do recommend subscribing and potentially supporting me on patreon for $3 a month
also I bought this really cool map on Etsy for this video but I don't really need it so if you comment on this post
on my patreon I will I'll pick a Raina person I'll ship it to you anyway so this river goes onwards down towards
Lake halia dumping into it via another waterfall have you noticed that the water in this game never Flows at a
slope it can only ever lose altitude by going over a waterfall I'm serious go back and watch the video up to this
point there's not a single time that the water flows at a sloping angle it's all flat which is unlike how Skyrim
represented its own Water Systems there's actually one instance of sloping water in this game that I could find and
I will show it to you later but see if you can think of where it is it's kind of obvious once you remember it anyway
the main thing that ruins any hope of this River actually ending in this lake is this large uncontrolled Whirlpool
that is draining all of the water from the lake to who knows where uh you can go into that whirlpool and it leads into
a large Cavern into which approximately 10,000 cubic feet of water is Flowing every single second I say approximately
because I got that number by taking the 700,000 cubic feet of water that flows through the Mississippi River every
second and just sort of eyeballing the size difference between the Mississippi and this gushing hole I will remind you
again that I'm not a scientist this cave could have been the end of the line for all of this water but unfortunately
while looking back over some of the footage I took I noticed something on the map Kora Lake Kora lake is a deep
blue color which makes it look lower in elev than the water in lakeia and that visual cue tricked my brain into
thinking that cor Lake kind of looked like a spot with high potential to be the actual Outlet of Lake halia
unfortunately for us the facts on the ground here paint a pretty Grim picture of the future of this part of Hyrule dun
dunun if we compare the maps of Hyrule between 2017's breath of the wild and 2023 is tiers of the Kingdom it's clear
that the land here has changed pretty dramatically first of all this channel has opened up underneath like kyia and
it's taking quite a bit of water which over time will cause that opening to widen causing it to take more water
causing it to widen even faster and so on and so on and so on this will cause the ground underneath to become more
saturated weakening its structural integrity and eventually creating things like new cave systems and sinkholes it's
also possible that the entirety of Lake halia will collapse in on itself which is similar to what happened at Lake
pen in Louisiana in 1980 where a drilling company AC this is a true story a Drilling company accidentally
penetrated a salt mine that was underneath a lake bed and caused the entire Lake to drain into the mine
shafts which eventually caused the whole lake to collapse in on itself creating a gigantic gargantuan Whirlpool that
sucked up entire barges and temporarily created the tallest waterfall in Louisiana of all time hm a giant
of this drainage are evident in the surrounding terrain cor Lake the lake that hypothesize might be the outflow
from Lake halia is fed by rapidly flowing groundwater from the direction of lake halia and in between this point
and the lake is a system of clearly unstable and very saturated caves that you know on to top it all off didn't
exist 7 years ago during breath of the wild compare the two maps and you can see how the space between the two is
just starting to fall apart I think there's a good chance that this whole region is going to collapse and drain
directly into the bay in the next few years the consequences of which will require someone with a college degree to
fully predict so yeah if you're playing teers of the Kingdom anytime in the next 5 to 10 years I would avoid this area uh
so that you don't get buried alive in the mud when it all collapses also on a side note if the ceiling of the depths
is 1,400 ft thick which based on my rough calculations using Earth's terminal velocity and the time it takes
to fall down there it is how long until all of that just collapses too how long until Hudson Construction Company
becomes Hudson oil Co and drills just a little too deep okay okay the last place we need to map is all the way back up
here remember where we uh initially split off from Hyrule Castle remember that this river flows backways and there
are lots of fun details along this route from Little docks to small Islands to two separate Bridges we get to go
underneath I told you I like Bridges and this River has two it has Ruby Bridges and Jeff Bridges that was a Ruby Bridges
Jeff Bridges crossover joke a little bit further up you can find the liru wetlands Where the River just kind of
spills out onto the land more permanently creating this beautiful clear environment for lots of different
plant and animal life also contributing to these Wetlands is another Lake to the South that used to be a lake but is now
actually two Lakes connected by a cave telta Lake and Lake Cella in breath of the wild were just two unremarkable and
odd little spots where you could go stand to feel strange feelings for no reason but in tears of the Kingdom like
we saw earlier Nintendo has connected the two by a long underground river that river is ultimately fed by this point
water generating out the side of a mountain and again there's just a little Notch there to show where it's really
flowing from going back further is this winding stream that's been carved into the mountain side this stream is lined
with little water features like splotchy ponds and small spawning waterfalls and eventually it opens back into the lake
that follows the waterfall that follows the large city of fish people called Zora domain Zora's domain is a very
weird place hydrologically with waterfalls in three places around it replenishing its Reservoir and at the
top of these waterfalls are some sort of strange paper shredder looking structures out of which the water pours
no matter how hard I think I I really could not come up with a great explanation for how this could possibly
be functioning which goes back to what I was saying that these games seem to either have absolutely incredible subtle
fascinating displays of hydrology or just straight up wizard magic I also found this in Zora's domain which is the
closest equivalent to that wonderful point we located in Skyrim where water seems to just spawn and then immediately
split off into two separate paths unlike Skyrim there's a water to explain the source of the water itself uh but still
short of this being the Hyrule Continental Divide there's no real great reason why the water should go uh both
ways do you remember that question I asked you earlier about where the only sloping water in this game is it's right
here in Zora's domain this sloping water can be followed in Reverse up these slides until you reach the tops of these
spires where it all begins the options for explanation here are really only twofold either it just rains so much
here that the water never stops or there's some sort of Technology that pumps water up from the reservoir based
on the waterfall spawning machines I'm going with the ladder wizard magic one of the other waterfalls can be followed
back stepwise to a place called mea's Court a Fantastical fountain with intricate sculptures and uh structures
the water from which can be traced all the way back to this little Point uh called shatterback point I think is what
it's called and all of that water seems to once again just come from wizard magic even groundwater SE can't explain
all of this stuff honestly there's no other place in these games where where there's so much hyd rological
irrationality as in Zora's domain so the only conclusion I can reasonably draw is that being fish people they have some
sort of command of the water that we'll just never fully understand it's not all magic though they also do engineering
they've built the world's largest freshwater Reservoir here at East Lake a lot of the water from zor's domain comes
out of East Lake Reservoir and the zor have also damned up the south end of the lake creating a calmly flowing rutala
river down below I'm not saying this dam is hydroelectric but based on what we've seen of the Zora technological
capabilities I wouldn't put it past them that rutala River ultimately flows back down and reconnects directly with the
liru wetlands completing the loop and closing every single loose end we have on our diagram which means we should be
able to look at it and figure out uh the answer to those questions that we asked at the beginning where does all of this
start and where does all of this end based on everything we've seen we can glean a few things one Hyrule seems to
be one large Basin rather than multiple meaning all of the water ultimately connects uh via streams rivers or
groundwater movement number two the primary source of this river system is drum roll please the East Reservoir Lake
there are other smaller sources for the various tributaries but the vast majority of it starts right here
courtesy of the Zora which is a fun touch given the cultural role that the Zora play in the Zelda games and number
three there is not one but two end points for this river system lakeia and the unnamed lake near gudo Canyon pass
you heard me right half of the water in Hyrule goes to the most iconic water feature in the entire Zelda series and
the other half of it goes to a lake that they didn't even bother to name because it was so unremarkable what I want to
know honestly is if the developers of the game even knew this fact I could really see a world where they just
connected all the rivers and lakes without too much thought and if you asked I bet they would half guess and
say that it all goes to Lake halia but it doesn't it goes somewhere so much less notable and in some ways so much
more interesting now those of you with the Keen Eye will probably note that I did Skip something pretty important
there's a huge waterfall coming from the sky above the East Lake Reservoir that seems to be filling it up very directly
why haven't we followed that waterfall back to its source okay fine let's follow that waterfall to its source and
what we will find is that it all spawns out of this platform right here they actually call this area near the water
temple the great Wellspring of Hyrule which does imply that all the water comes from it but in terms of being
physically connected all of these islands with all their waterfalls are just completely separate with all of
their water just pouring over the sides and into the air which kind of explains why it rains so much you know like look
at all this water that's just being wasted something being wasted I mean it's going back into the water cycle
turning into clouds that then rain down upon High rule even the water temple itself the big spouts does the same
thing it just dumps it all off the edge so sure you could make the argument that in some ways these floating sky islands
are the real source of water for the river system here but I don't think I accept that I think that's a little bit
like saying that rain is the true source of the Mississippi River and that lake itasa is just one more stop in the water
cycle which is literally true all of this is just water and gravity that we even call them lakes and rivers and
streams is largely just ontological utility but that's what we do we make categories so that we can make sense and
we make sense because that's the thing that only we can do and if we didn't do it nobody would and so we have rivers
and so I have this video so I'm talking to you as far as the in-game lore is concerned though I actually sort of like
to think of the sky islands as allegory more than anything Zelda has always built its stories as Legend almost like
you're hearing the story told to you hundreds of years after the fact with particular stylings and exaggerations
hence the many different art styles the games have taken over the years so when you tell me that the Great temple in the
sky is where all the rain and water comes from I think of it more like saying thunder and lightning our Angels
bowling rather than hey actually if you go in the sky with a video camera you'll find a bowling alley full of people with
wings now that said it does rain a ton in this game and all of this water being dumped directly into the
atmosphere certainly isn't helping things in that regard wait I almost forgot I stayed up until 4:00 a.m. one
night making this very crude animation of all the water flowing in Hyrule and I wanted to show it to you I didn't really