Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mapper discovers a weird geographical plot hole that puts Hyrule in direct opposition to Skyrim

gamesradar.com:

There's a weird geographical quirk in the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom map - none of its rivers drain into the sea, and half of the game's freshwater ends up in an unnamed pond.

YouTuber Any Austin recently took it upon themselves to chart the many waterways that crisscrossed Hyrule. And their first observation is that none of those rivers reach the sea. At none of the points in Hyrule that look like they might be some kind of estuary, delta, or other river endpoint does the water actually drain into the sea. So with all that water flowing around, where does it actually go?

The answer lies in a lengthy map of Tears of the Kingdom's waterways, where Any Austin gradually comes to several other interesting realizations. One of those is that many of Hyrule's waterways that appear separate are actually connected - their links aren't shown on the map, but that's because they're joined together by underground caves that can't be seen on the surface. That leads him to his next discovery - those caves weren't present in Breath of the Wild, suggesting that the water courses have changed substantially in the time between the two games.

In turn, that brings him to another revelation - there are whole swathes of Tears of the Kingdom's version of Hyrule that have been massively altered by the changing paths of the water. New wetlands, gorges, caves, and waterfalls are not only present on the map, but have re-shaped it substantially. 

But in the course of charting all these rivers, Any Austin makes a handful of discoveries that are all much more important than a new map. The first, of course, is that those rivers don't reach the sea - earlier this year, Any Austin charted Skyrim's rivers, and found that they do reach an expected endpoint, but in Hyrule, there's no connection between freshwater and saltwater. That's partly because of his second big discovery - all of Hyrule's rivers are in fact the same river. Everything is connected up to everything else, and while the