The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - How to Upgrade Your Horses Quickly

Thanks to the addition of Zonai Devices, there’s a ton of ways you can get creative in moving around the vast world of Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Blasting yourself through the sky with a rocket attached to your shield is pretty entertaining, but perhaps you want the companionship of a trusty steed. If good, old-fashioned horseback riding is more your forte, you’ll probably want to pay Malanya the Horse God a visit in order to maximize your horse’s stats.

If you played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you might remember that Malanya the Horse God could be found deep in south Hyrule in the Lake Hylia region. Malanya has moved, however, and can now be found nearly as far to the northeast as you can go in the Akkala region. It’s definitely a long way from the game’s starting point, but players can comfortably follow a road that leads from Lookout Landing to Malanya’s new home of Malanya Spring (coordinates 4293, 3205, 0149).

Your lengthy journey to Malanya will have to be filled with some stops along the way. For starters, Malanya won’t appear unless you make an offering of a single Endura Carrot. These are easily found near Cherry Blossom Trees, and one such tree is conveniently in between Lookout Landing and Malanya Spring at coordinates 0316, 0538, 0022. The next thing you’ll want to keep an eye out for while on the road is any wild herb you can find and plenty of them. Hyrule Herbs, Fortified Pumpkins, Blue Nightshade, Sundelions, and more. You’ll also want to smack ore deposits to acquire a bit of Rock Salt.

After you’ve woken Malanya with an Endura Carrot, the Horse God himself will explain to you that he can upgrade each stat of your horses in exchange for cooked meals. The better an improvement, the more meals it will cost, naturally. However, two of the most useful stats, Strength and Speed, can be quickly upgraded from their lower levels just with the herbs you collected on the way to Malanya. Fried Wild Greens can be made simply by cooking a single herb of any kind, and Copious Fried Wild Greens are made from combining four different herbs into one dish. These two meals can boost any horse’s Strength stat from 1 to 3 giving them a much improved amount of health. Throw a single herb in a cooking pot with one piece of Rock Salt and you’ll get Salt-Grilled Greens that can boost a horse’s Speed from 2 to 3.

Of course, the stronger upgrades require much more detailed meals with ingredients that are trickier to acquire, but boosting a horse’s Strength and Speed for just a few herbs is definitely quicker than catching wild horse after wild horse to get some better stats.