Tears of the Kingdom: Shield surfing using Icy Meat has unexpected benefits 

Players have been continuing their research on what can be combined with a shield using Fuse to make useful items in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. One of these items is Icy Meat, which might actually be a more convenient item to use for shield surfing than Mine Carts. Please note that this article contains actual examples of the usage of the Fuse ability. 

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an action-adventure game currently available for Nintendo Switch. It is the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In the new game, the land of Hyrule is suddenly struck by unusual natural disasters – castles rise into the air and mysterious ruins rain down from the sky. In a world with an expanded earth and sky, Link, possessing new powers in his right hand, confronts the catastrophes in Hyrule. The game sold over 10 million units within the first three days of release. 

While Tears of the Kingdom comes with many new features, much of the gameplay mechanics have been retained from the previous title, including shield surfing. In Breath of the Wild, Link was able to jump onto his shield and slide down sloped surfaces on it. Besides looking cool, it can also be used to achieve considerable speeds.  

Furthermore, in Tears of the Kingdom, shield surfing has evolved: The newly introduced Fuse ability lets you combine your shield with various items to make changes to how surfing works. For example, when combined with a Mine Cart, the shield becomes a wheeled skateboard (Related article). This allows you to glide more smoothly against various surfaces, such as grass, snow fields, sand and other surfaces which offer more resistance.   

Recently an unexpected item is attracting the attention of players who like to modify their shields. Apparently, fusing your shield with Icy Meat to make an Icy Meat shield has great benefits, which are demonstrated in the post below by Max Blumenthal of GameSpot. 

In the video, Blumenthal uses Icy Prime Meat to modify his shield and demonstrates how smoothly he can shield-surf with the Icy Meat shield. It seems that you can accelerate a bit even on flat surfaces if you make a spin jump. This clever combination takes advantage of how slippery items become when frozen. 

Although fusing Icy Meat with your shield has a similar effect to fusing a Mine Cart, Blumenthal points out that meat items are much easier to come by, as Mine Carts can be found only in specific areas and meat items can be obtained at any time by hunting animals. One more benefit is that, unlike Mine Carts, you can carry multiple meats with you in your inventory. Blumenthal even goes on to describe Icy Meat as “shield surf meta.” 

Since Blumenthal mentioned that if there were a tier list of Icy Meats, chicken meat would be D tier, I (the original author of this article) tried it out myself, and indeed it was not very easy to shield surf using chicken meat, as Link could not keep his balance or accelerate very much due to the irregular shape. It would be a fascinating experiment to freeze a variety of meats and test their performances. 

There are many other items that players are researching for shield surfing purposes, such as various types of Zonai Devices. By fusing the Wing Zonai Device with your shield, you can increase your jump power at the start of shield surfing. Players discovered that in this way you can reach the height you need to activate the slow motion bow attack. You can also attach the Rocket Zonai Device to your shield to launch yourself into the air or wreak havoc to your surroundings with a Flower Bomb-shield while jumping away unharmed. Either technique allows you to activate the slow motion effect and is thus useful not only for traveling but for combat as well.

Two weeks have passed since the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and players are progressing further and further with their research of all the new features and abilities to make new discoveries. Following Icy Meat, other seemingly regular items might also turn out to have surprising benefits. 

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available now for Nintendo Switch. 

Written by. Amber V based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2023-05-26 14:03 JST)