Hyrule doesn’t hand out power for free-every shrine reward forces a choice that shapes your adventure. Should you pour your effort into more hearts to face brutal bosses or expand your stamina for soaring glides and daring climbs? The answer depends on how you survive-and how you explore.
Heart containers will provide you with an extra heart in your health bar, letting you survive longer and take more hits. Stamina vessels, meanwhile, will provide you with one-fifth of a stamina wheel, allowing you to safely glide longer distances and climb to higher elevation.
Both options have their pros and cons and there is no definitive correct answer here, but we can help you make a decision. Learn more about whether or not you should invest in heart containers or stamina vessels in our Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom guide.
Hearts or stamina in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom?
Choosing between hearts and stamina in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom depends on how you prefer to play. Extra hearts help you survive tough fights and environmental hazards, while more stamina makes exploring easier-especially for climbing, gliding, and swimming longer distances. Many players start by boosting stamina to explore freely, then switch focus to hearts before tackling stronger enemies and bosses. The balance between the two shapes how smooth or risky your adventure feels.
There are many benefits to exchanging your Lights of Blessing for heart containers or stamina vessels. If you’ve played Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you may have a few preconceptions as to where you should allocate your Lights of Blessings, but with the new additions from Tears of the Kingdom, you may have to recalibrate your expectations.
Choose hearts over stamina
Prioritizing hearts keeps Link alive through brutal falls, scorching heat, and savage enemy swarms in Hyrule’s skies and depths. Extra health absorbs punishment from Lynel charges or Gleeok blasts, letting you recover and strike back without constant retreats. Stamina runs out fast on endless climbs or glider sprints, but hearts buy time to eat, heal, and push forward. In tough shrines and boss lairs, surviving a few more hits often trumps precise jumps or dodges. Go for hearts first if raw staying power feels right for your playstyle.
At the start of the Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, you’ll have three hearts, which isn’t much to work with. Early on, enemies won’t deal as much damage to you, but will grow stronger as you defeat more enemies. Even one or two hearts can save your life and prevent enemies from killing you in one hit – a common occurrence in the game’s early hours.
For those who do not see themselves as a Gamer, a higher health pool will give you more room to work with when fighting enemies, and make your battles a little less anxiety-inducing.
With the addition of the Depths, heart containers become a valuable resource. In the Depths, you’ll find gloom, a dark substance that depletes your hearts. Once your hearts are depleted, you won’t be able to freely heal with your standard food or elixirs. You’ll need to either consume a dish made with sundelions or visit a lightroot to restore your hearts back to normal. If you don’t have sundelion dishes and get hit by gloom enemies, your maximum health pool will slowly dwindle down with every hit.
New additions to Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom minimize your need to rely on stamina. Skyview Towers will launch you into the air, allowing you to glide to nearby areas and reach higher heights – lowering your need to sprint and climb. Creating vehicles with Ultrahand, and sometimes Fuse, allows you to travel around Hyrule however you see fit – again lowering the necessity to burn stamina.
Lastly, you’ll come across a door on the Great Sky Island that you need four hearts to open. We know of one other door where you need 10 hearts to open it, but since we’ve found another door, there is a chance you’ll find more heart doors scattered around Hyrule.
Choose stamina over hearts
Choosing stamina over hearts gives you more mobility and farmable options for exploration, letting you reach higher platforms, dodge tricky enemies, and access hidden areas without being slowed by limited health.
Alternatively, you can exchange your Lights of Blessing for stamina vessels to leisurely traverse Hyrule. You may not have many hearts, but you’ll learn how to dodge as if your life depends on it – because it really does.
At the beginning of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, you’ll have one stamina wheel – which gives you little room to sprint, swim, climb, or glide. Although some of the additions to Tears of the Kingdom minimize the need to prioritize acquiring stamina vessels, the large range of verticality in the game increases your need to rely on gliding. After launching out of a Skyview Tower or diving off of a sky island, you’ll soon realize that gliding depletes your stamina wheels fairly quickly. With extra stamina, you’ll be able to safely reach far-off destinations.
Stamina also affects your combat prowess – affecting how long you can aim a bow mid-air or perform charged attacks. You spend a lot of time in the air and face a lot of swift enemies in Tears of the Kingdom, making the slow-motion bow-and-arrow technique extremely useful. As you fight more and more enemies, you’ll become more accustomed to their attack patterns. You’ll have more experience in dodging attacks and avoiding damage altogether.
There are more methods to restore your health than there are to replenish your stamina. To heal, you can eat a variety of food or ingredients, sleep at an inn, or even rest in a hot spring. Restoring your stamina wheels, however, is slightly more difficult: You’ll need to search for specific ingredients to create dishes and elixirs before using your stamina.
[Editor’s note: Spoilers follow for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.]
The last, and most important, reason to increase your stamina is that you need at least two full stamina wheels to get the Master Sword. You’ll need to dedicate 20 shrines to stamina to retrieve the iconic weapon, which you can get as soon as you get the required stamina. If you decide to dedicate all of your Lights of Blessing to stamina vessels, you can get the Master Sword fairly early in your playthrough.
What we recommend
If you’re mainly exploring and climbing, investing in stamina vessels gives you more freedom to glide and scale cliffs without constant breaks. Players focusing on boss battles or tougher enemies may prefer heart containers for better survivability. A balanced approach works well-upgrade stamina early for convenience, then shift toward hearts once exploration becomes easier.
For beginners, we suggest that you focus on getting six to eight hearts before increasing your stamina gauge. This will help you learn how to fight against enemies and get you acclimated to how Tears of the Kingdom plays. If you’re having a hard time after increasing your hearts, continue to increase your hearts to a more comfortable health total. For those who have a lot of experience playing the predecessor, Breath of the Wild, challenge yourself by increasing your stamina wheel instead.
Keep in mind, you can always change your mind later on! You can convert your hearts into stamina or vice versa at the Horned Statue at the Emergency Shelter in Lookout Landing.
Head to Lookout Landing after completing one of the temples in the main villages to find a hole in the wall on the north side of the Emergency Shelter. Head inside the hole, break a few rocks, and turn right to find the Horned Statue that will let you convert your hearts or stamina at the cost of rupees. When you first meet the Horned Statue, it will take a heart away from you. Interact with it again to receive a stamina vessel in return. From that point on, you must trade in one of your hearts or one-fifth of a stamina wheel for 100 rupees to then receive the opposite for 120 rupees. In total, you’ll spend 20 rupees to convert a heart container into a stamina wheel or vice versa.
How many stamina vessels for two full wheels
Two full stamina wheels is a total of 8 stamina vessels.
-
You start with 1 full wheel.
-
Each stamina vessel adds one quarter of a wheel.
-
One extra wheel = 4 vessels, so going from 1 wheel to 3 wheels (two additional full wheels) takes +=4 + 4 = 8+= stamina vessels.
How to respec hearts into stamina vessels using Horned Statue
To respec hearts into stamina at the Horned (cursed) Statue, you basically sell one type of “essence” and buy it back as the other, paying a small rupee fee overall.
Step-by-step respec
-
Find and talk to the Horned Statue
-
It’s the demonic statue hidden beneath Lookout Landing, reached during the “Who Goes There?” / “A Deal with the Statue” side quest. Once unlocked, you can talk to it anytime to swap hearts and stamina.
-
-
Sell an essence (heart or stamina)
-
When you interact, choose to give up a Heart Container (or a Stamina Vessel if going the other way).
-
The statue takes 1 heart (or 1 stamina segment) and gives you 100 rupees in return.
-
-
Buy an essence back as stamina
-
Talk to the statue again and choose the option along the lines of “I want one back.”
-
Now pick Stamina Vessel as the essence you want.
-
You pay 120 rupees to get that stamina segment back, effectively turning a heart into stamina for a net cost of 20 rupees.
-
-
Repeat as needed
-
You can do this as many times as you like, as long as you can afford the rupees and still have at least the minimum hearts/stamina you’re comfortable with.
-
In short: give the statue 1 heart to get 100 rupees, then immediately buy 1 stamina vessel for 120 rupees, turning that heart into stamina at a 20-rupee loss each time.
