Tears of the Kingdom glitch hunters aren’t just breaking the game — they’re expanding it

theverge.com:

It took an international collaboration to begin cracking Tears of the Kingdom open. For the first few days after the game’s release, glitch hunters had been trying to break it using techniques similar to those used in Breath of the Wild, but nothing was working.

“Everyone was kind of scratching their heads,” recalls one glitch hunter who goes by the name Mozz. Then, on day three, a breakthrough arrived on Discord, courtesy of the Chinese community’s discovery of a number of duplication bugs. Sure enough, Mozz and their fellow glitch hunters were able to replicate them. One thing led to another, glitches got stacked upon glitches, and the effects of the exploded code began to cascade.

Since Tears of the Kingdom’s launch on May 12th, a committed group of glitch hunters has dedicated much of their spare time to trying to break the game. Some do it in service of speedrunning, finding movement exploits that let them traverse the game’s 198-mile map at lightning speed. Others seek out glitches for the sheer subversive fun of it — the thrill of seeing the game spit out seemingly impossible outcomes. “The ability to take a game and expand it in ways that not even the developers could have imagined is so much fun,” Mozz says. Another glitch hunter, called Yoda39, describes the central appeal as “seeing the game react to the ridiculous circumstances you put it in.” 

So far, these “ridiculous circumstances” have produced all manner of bizarre and useful outcomes, from the duplication of items to combat exploits like “zuggling,” which lets players fuse together multiple weapons to wield a supercharged blade. In fact, Link’s Fuse power is the basis for another powerful glitch, called “Fuse entanglement.” When applied to a shield and