Want 100 Gold Skulltulas in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, but don’t want to track all of them down? Well, that’s a weird thing to want, but if you’re sure, someone has found a way to make one specific Gold Skulltula regenerate infinitely by replicating a glitch from the original game…with a bit of extra work added. It’s time consuming and roundabout, but it seems to really work!
In the original Ocarina of Time, you could get as many Gold Skulltula Tokens as you wanted by visiting a grotto outside of Hyrule Castle that’s opened by playing the Song of Storms on a plant. Inside, there’s a Gold Skulltula behind a bombable wall that child Link can defeat at a distance with a boomerang, and then use the boomerang again to collect the token. However, if you used the boomerang to collect the token as you exit the room via the flower elevator, you’ll collect the token on your way out, but the Skulltula itself will be there waiting for you if you reenter the grotto, allowing you to collect the token again and again, infinitely, in the same way.
This glitch’s replication was first noted by Reddit use Wrong-Kangaroo-4352 almost a week ago, but without much detail as to how to make it work. A few commenters at the time pointed out that doing the original method as-is wasn’t working for them:
But then today, Reddit user theletter454 arrived to explain what was going on. They said that they tried to replicate this glitch with the same grotto and steps, but initially thought that it had been patched out, because when they reentered the grotto, the Gold Skulltula was gone. However, when they finished the game, they noticed that they were missing 1% completion, with the Nintendo Switch Online app pointing to an uncollected token in Hyrule Castle. They returned, and sure enough, the Skulltula was back!
What theletter454 has worked out, along with some help from folks in the comments, is that the loading zones need to be completely reset for the Gold Skulltula to reappear. This means doing something like swapping back and forth between adult and child Link, or warping to areas with different loading zones, like Lake Hylia. So while a bit more time-consuming than just leaving and reentering the grotto, the fundamentals of the glitch remain intact. And yes, you can just load up on 100 Skulltulas this way if you’re short some, though the game’s counter won’t let you bring the number above 101.
As one commenter points out, Nintendo developers including Satoru Iwata, when working on the 2011 3DS remake, talked about deliberately leaving in certain bugs from the original, because some of the staff who played the original game thought they were fun and a core part of the experience. It’s entirely possible that the same thought process happened here too, especially given that this glitch is ultimately pretty harmless.
