How to resist & heal gloom damage in Tears of the Kingdom

Gloom and despair

I don’t like gloom. It’s stick and corrosive and irritating and it gets everywhere. You shouldn’t like gloom either, because if it damages you in the depths of Hyrule, you’ll take gloom damage. This not only decreases your heart count but locks that heart container out completely until you can cleanse yourself.

This is especially problematic at the beginning of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, where a locked heart can take a huge bite out of your resources. Later, however, you can go further and plumb more dangerous depths, so long as you learn to manage your gloom. It’s not easy, but we’re here to help.

Resisting gloom

If you know you’re going to get sticky, then you’re going to need to prepare. There are two major ways to reduce the amount of gloom damage you take, and it’s the same as with just about every hazard in the game. You can either suit up with the right armor or cook and eat the right food.

You can buy the armor in question from the Bargainer Statue, which is a chunky rock that looks like a melted wizard. You’ll find your first one sitting conspicuously in Lookout Landing, but you’ll need to find six of them to get the full armor set. At these spots, you trade Poes for goods. Poes are little whisps of blue light you encounter in the depths. If you find a grouping of these, you can just scoop them all into your pocket. You’ll need a lot of Poes, but once you find them and the statues, you can unlock the Armor of the Depths set and up your resistance.

If you’re too hooked on a specific look to ruin it with some other armor, you can cook food to increase your gloom resistance. Just drop a Dark Clump into any recipe, and you’ll earn a window of resistance. You buy Dark Clumps from the bargainer statue.

You can also tame a skeletal horse down in the depths. While these don’t increase your resistance, you also won’t take gloom damage while riding across patches. It’s like what they always say: you can’t beat a dead horse.

Curing gloom

If you take gloom damage – and really, it’s kind of inevitable – you’re going to need a way to heal it. Normal food won’t work, as those locked hearts simply won’t refill. Traveling back to the surface is one way to drop those bad hearts, as they seem to be weakest against sunlight. There are a couple ways that don’t require leaving the depths, however.

The first is using Lightroots. These are essentially sunlight in the depths. Standing under one of them will instantly clear your affliction. These are scattered all across the depths and are used to light up large portions of the subterranean landscape. If you take too much gloom damage, you can always double back and stand under one for a few seconds.

Otherwise, you can use food to wipe your corrupt heart. The secret ingredient to do this is sundelions. These are commonly found in the floating ruins. You can also find them on chunks of Zonai ruins that have hit the ground, but you’ll need to go airborne to stock up. It’s handy to have some healing items in your inventory at all times since you never know when you might run up against a gloom monster.