Tears of the Kingdom: Jiukoum Shrine rail puzzle stumps players worldwide 

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s Jiukoum Shrine has got players all over the world talking about its difficulty. The shrine has proven to be a grueling challenge for many players thanks to the wealth of demanding puzzles that require creativity and flexible thinking. 

In Tears of the Kingdom, there are a variety of different Shrines of Light located around Hyrule. Completing a Shrine of Light rewards Link with a Light of Blessing, which allows him to regain a portion of his original strength. Shrines have wide-ranging puzzles that are made to coincide with the breadth of Link’s abilities, and the difficulty of each shrine differs greatly. One of the shrines that is considered especially tough is Jiukoum Shrine. 

Please note that this article details the location of Jiukoum Shrine as well as methods to complete it.  

Jiukoum Shrine is located in the Popla Foothills area. It’s placed in a spot that’s easy to find, and you will likely come across it while wandering through the area. What’s unique about this shrine is that it’s almost like being tasked with constructing your own roller coaster. There are many rails set up within the shrine, and you ride along them using any kind of contraption that you can create with metal panels. Using the panels to ride the rails like a roller coaster makes for probably one of the most enjoyable shrines in the game. At the same time, this shrine is also incredibly difficult. Strictly speaking, it’s the final puzzle that is particularly punishing. 

The final puzzle is also one that requires building a means to ride along rails. It looks simple at first glance but is actually far trickier than it seems. This is because there are two sets of rails at the starting point, but they come to an end halfway to your destination where you must then continue along a single set of rails. The problem is how to advance from the dual rails to the single one, and it has left players all over the world scratching their heads.  

If you search for “ジウコウメ ” (Jiukoum) on Twitter in Japan, you will find many troubled players. What’s more, when you type Jiukoum into Google, one of the suggestions that pops up is “difficult.” That shows just how tall an order players are finding this shrine to be. Kotaku even wrote a feature on it, so it appears that both players in Japan and overseas are having a tough time of it.  

So how do you solve it? Well, there are many ways to do it. Some overcome the challenge using wind power, while others use shield surfing to get past the rails in a more devious manner. Some even make two different objects to ride on and force their way across, and others use the tried-and-true method of avoiding the puzzle completely by just building a really long bridge. Every player has their own approach.  

Despite how hard it may look, the solution is exceedingly simple. You just need to make a platform with three “legs.” Attach three panels equally spaced apart to the bottom of the panel on which you stand, and then attach Fan Zonai Devices on top to push yourself along. The outer “legs” will slide along the outer rails, and then when those rails end, the middle “leg” will enter and slide along the single rail with no issue.  

With such a simple solution, why is it that so many players are stumped? The reason is that they have been “trained” to think a certain way. The majority of the other rail puzzles have instilled the idea that the solution often involves using only one of the rails or building a platform that has only one or two “legs.” The more that a player has gotten used to doing things this way, the more trouble that they seem to have with the Jiukoum puzzle. I (the original author of this article) was also one such player, and found the shrine to be incredibly interesting because of how it took advantage of my assumptions. As an aside, there was a player who used shield surfing to speedrun Jiukoum Shrine in only 22 seconds. I suppose that as long as it gets you to the end, anything goes. 

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

Written by. Marco Farinaccia based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2023-06-05 20:28 JST)