Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s blood moon has a secret purpose

polygon.com:

The blood moon in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of the game’s creepiest moments. Scarlet clouds paint the sky and a ghostly aura reanimates monsters from the dead. The scene is among one of the scarier parts of the game, but beneath its red ooze, this event hides a practical application: The blood moon functions as a way to refresh the game’s memory use and stop Link from pushing the Nintendo Switch to its limits.

The regular (non-glitched) blood moon rises every 168 minutes, the equivalent to one week of in-game time. Once the cutscene plays, enemies in Hyrule respawn and Link gets a fresh batch of monsters to fight. Although waiting for the elapsed time is the more common method to experience a blood moon, it isn’t the only way. Players can force a blood moon scene by overloading the Switch’s memory. Fans have dubbed the phenomena a “panic moon” because the game uses the moon as a failsafe to stop things from crashing when players push the game’s memory usage to its limits.

In a previous article, Polygon spoke to MiztrSage, an expert builder from the Hyrule Engineering subreddit. In his work, the builder explained how the game itself can be a limiting factor in what can — or can’t — be built in the game. The builder explained to Polygon how the blood moon is actually used as a way to make up for the Switch’s limitations:

The game has a built-in memory ‘refresher’ which automatically triggers a blood moon once you start ‘pressuring’ the game with, for example, too many objects in Link’s vicinity. The blood moon then removes all the objects around you that caused this overload and resets enemies. All because the Switch is not powerful enough.

Players have documented a few ways to pull off the “panic