3 Rarest Encounters In The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild

One of the greatest charms about massive, genre-defining open world games like "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" is that they're so big and detailed, fans are still finding undiscovered secrets years and years after release. There are probably at least one or two things a player has never encountered (or even heard of), no matter how many hours they've sunk into exploring the wide expanses of Hyrule.

Like many modern open world games, "Breath of the Wild" has its own collection of hidden secrets and rare occurrences: From mysterious events that only occur once in a blue moon to the unlikeliest of monster spawns, here are the three rarest encounters in "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild."

Starting with the most infamous one, the Lord of the Mountain is an extremely rare mount that spawns irregularly on Satori Mountain, and is often referred to by the name of Satori himself. As you might be able to tell from the name, this deer is known as Nintendo's tribute to the late Iwata Satoru, Nintendo's former president and the face of the company from 2002 until his passing in 2015.

You can only encounter the Lord of the Mountain when the mountain's peak starts glowing green. An in-depth analysis of game mechanics reveals that Satori will always spawn on the day of a waxing crescent moon so long as the right conditions are met. Namely, the player has to be a certain distance away from the mountain itself and must not use campfires to pass the time through the day, as that will simply cancel its spawn chance altogether.

The Lord of the Mountain can be ridden and is very fast with possibly the best stats in the game; however, it is also the hardest mount to tame, cannot be stabled, and will dissipate upon dismounting. While it's a shame you can't keep this exceptional steed after the lengths you have to go through in order to meet and tame it, perhaps it's for the best that the tribute to the beloved CEO remains a free spirit who is only encountered once in a blue (crescent) moon.

When you're getting your hearts beaten out of you by a random Lynel who couldn't leave you well enough alone, you're probably not thinking too hard about whether its weapon matches the kind of Lynel it is. Maybe you didn't even know that certain kinds of Lynels are supposed to have a certain weapon. After all, most enemies scale to your World Level – the tally of points earned from killing monsters — so it's easy to assume that every monster you encounter will automatically have the appropriate upgrades. 

However, it seems that weapon upgrades and monster type upgrades operate on a completely separate systems that scale off a player's World Level in different amounts, sometimes resulting in a few possible but extremely rare combinations that can only be encountered during extremely short progression windows. The actual math that goes into Lynel spawns is somewhat complicated, but boils down to the fact that there are three aspects of a single Lynel that can be "mismatched": mane color, main weapon, and bow type. There are a total of 10 "rare" Lynel combinations that only pop up during very specific World Levels: The rarest of them all — with a miniscule encounter window of between 2750 to 2786 World Level points — are regular Lynels with the Savage Lynel Bow and either the Mighty Lynel Crusher or Mighty Lynel Sword. 

Forget Divine Beasts, the real elusive creatures of "Breath of the Wild" are the many, many different animals you're supposed to record on your Sheikah Slate in order to complete the Hyrule Compendium. Each species has a seemingly endless amount of variants and colors, all of which are counted as separate entries — hunting down each and every one of them is a nightmare of a marathon that few can claim to have completed.

Some animals are rarer than others, of course, and it seems the rarest of them all are the Rainbow Pigeons. Many players have completed the game many times over across the years since it was released and have reportedly never encountered one even once. Some didn't even know that it existed at all, making it even more elusive than Satori. Apparently, they can be found in flocks around the mushroom trees in Seres Scablands — unfortunately, they very rarely land for long enough to be noticed, much less photographed. You'll have to climb atop one of the muchroom trees and wait patiently for a chance to grab some snapshots and finally tick off one of the rarest entries in your compendium collection.