Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s duplication glitch is ruining Hyrule’s economy

A glitch that allows you to duplicate items in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom makes people earn a lot of rupees, which can’t be good for the economy.

We’ve all had this thought at one point or another when it comes to fixing the economy: “why can’t they just print more money?” I’m not going to pretend I know exactly why it doesn’t work, but essentially, you print more money, inflation happens, money is worth less and less. So the recent duplication glitch encountered by Tears of the Kingdom players can only spell the end of the Hyrule economy as we know it. Essentially, the glitch allows you to duplicate any material or weapon, and with certain items worth a pretty penny, it becomes very easy to rack up rupees quickly.

youtuber linkus7 provided a more detailed explanation on how you can fix the glitch (thanks GamesRadar), which isn’t too complicated overall, although it does require some quick button presses. First of all, you can solve the glitch literally anywhere in the game, you just need two bows and whatever material you want to duplicate. The next step is to prepare your bow and fuse the material to your arrow. After that, pause and go to your bow menu, and choose to drop the bow you have equipped, but don’t stop it yet. Next you need to select your other bow, and after this comes the trickier part.

Once you’ve equipped the second bow, you need to pause and resume as quickly as you can. Then just drop the second bow you’ve equipped, and it should have duplicated the item you originally tried to fuse. It’s a bit of a tight window to get the timing of pause and resume right, I haven’t managed to pull it off myself, but I’d rather be known as the savior of Hyrule than ruin the economy. Maybe it would be better to try some different cool stuff that you can merge into instead.