Zelda Tears of the Kingdom: How to Respec Hearts & Stamina upgrades

by Alex Donaldson on 12 May, 2023

As you progress through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, you’ll be gathering valuable Light of Blessing items and using them to upgrade your Hearts and Stamina, improving your survivability out in the world. But did you know that if you change your mind about an upgrade, you can Respec?

That’s right - a little bit of an RPG tradition creeps into Zelda with a respec ability in Tears of the Kingdom. This is a returning feature from BOTW, though like much in TOTK such as the Horse God, its location and specifics has been moved for this new title.

You’ll need to complete a couple of side adventures in order to unlock the ability to swap your upgrades around - which this guide will now explain.

How to reach the Cursed Statue to Respec Hearts & Stamina

You'll need to chat to Jerrin about her fears and go into the mysterious passage to find the Cursed Statue.

Once your adventure is underway and you’re down in Hyrule with the Paraglider unlocked, you’ll need to return to Lookout Landing, the first town you find after diving from the Great Sky Island, just at the foot of where Hyrule Castle Town once began.

In the center of Lookout Landing is the Emergency Shelter, which the game does push you to open. The emergency shelter can be missed for a while if you peel off doing other things, but you just need to chat to the NPC outside it to get it opened. Down here you can cook, find a level up statue, and a number of other friendly NPCs. Some quests also trigger down here.

Keep an eye out for the red quest marker next to the NPC Jerrin, who has been hearing a strange, spooky voice from within the Emergency Shelter. You’ll need to head through the hole in the wall Jerren points out, into the Royal Hidden Passage. Down here, after smashing through a bunch of rocks, you’ll find the devil-horned Cursed Statue.

For the record, you can continue smashing into these caves, which lead right under Hyrule Castle Town. It’s a lengthy network of caves, but you can pick up all three parts of the Soldier’s Armor Set in here if you want. All of that comes after the Cursed Statue, however.

Once you talk to the Cursed Statue, it’ll trigger the ‘A Deal with the Statue’ quest. This acts as a tutorial for the mechanic - where the statue steals a valuable heart from you, then returns it after you complain. From this point on, you can make deals with the statue to respec your hearts and stamina.

Once you've met the Cursed Statue, you can return to it any time in TOTK to respec.

How the Cursed Statue Works

Unfortunately, this isn’t a simple or ‘full’ respec mechanic. All you can do is have the statue take away one Heart or Stamina upgrade - and then ‘buy’ it back. However, when you buy the upgrade back, you can choose which type you want. Through this, you can swap an extra heart for extra stamina, or the reverse.

There is a cost to this. When you sell an existing upgrade to the Cursed Statue, it’ll give you 100 Rupees for your sacrifice. To buy back the upgrade, you’ll need to hand over 120 Rupees.

That means there’s a net cost of 20 Rupees per swap - but that’s well worth it if you’re desperate for some extra Stamina… especially if you need it to obtain a certain sword of legend. You sadly can't do bulk swaps - so if you want to switch a bunch of hearts to stamina or the reverse, it'll take you a little while and a chunk of change to do so.