Zelda Tears of the Kingdom: Light Dragon Location Map, Route, and farming tips

Dragons make a return in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - both familiar and new. In fact, the newest of these creatures - the Light Dragon - is the most important. But it’s also a rather elusive being, if you don’t know the route it flies and where to find it. 

In fact, even if you’re familiar with the nature of the three other dragons from back in BOTW, it’s worth noting that the way that the dragons work in TOTK is a little different.

This guide is here to help you make sense of the differences, plus to help clue you in on the Light Dragon’s path & route through Hyrule - which should make it much easier for you to find its location for whatever reason you need it for.

Tears of the Kingdom Sky Dragon Location & Route

If you take a look at the above map, the blue line offers a rough outline of the Light Dragon’s route through Hyrule. 

As you can see, the Light Dragon path is clockwise, and weaves mostly around the outskirts of the kingdom - though it comes in and out of the inner part of the map here and there. It takes the Light Dragon around 2 hours to complete a full loop. 

It's worth keeping in mind that in some areas the Light Dragon flies you may need some environmental protection from the elements - either in the form of armor or meals. Usually, this is just Cold Resistance.

The map is helpful - but there are other things that’ll assist in knowing the Light Dragon’s location and path that’ll make matters even easier. Read on for our tips on locating this mysterious new Dragon…

Working out the Light Dragon’s Current Position & Path

Here’s the biggest difference between Tears of the Kingdom and BOTW: Dragons no longer react to fast travel or time skips. In BOTW, it was possible to know a dragon would be in an exact and specific spot at a particular time, and use this to identify and farm materials from the dragons. In TOTK, the dragon’s position will not change when you fast travel - instead, it’ll slowly weave its way around the map regardless of what you’re doing below.

As such, we can’t give you helpful timestamps to say ‘The Light Dragon is over Hebra at 3pm’, because the timing of the movements will vary, and desync from the starting positions at the start of the game from the very first moment time skips for any reason, which happens a lot.

One thing our map doesn’t account for is the height of the Light Dragon. It can fly as high as 2500 on the in-game vertical coordinates - which puts her up above many of the Sky Islands. However, once you cure Korok Forest and the Deku Tree, the Light Dragon will move to fly much lower until you obtain the Master Sword. 

This will also straight up drop an objective marker on the Light Dragon - but that disappears once that quest is over. After that, the dragon returns to having variable heights. Generally speaking, however, with a decent amount of stamina to glide you should be able to reach the Light Dragon from any of the Skyview Towers it flies close to.

Failing that, don’t forget you can make use of Zonai devices. For what it’s worth, we found the Hebra region (top left of the map) a great place to reach it from the nearby Skyview Towers. The same is true for the Gerudo Highlands Skyview Tower, and the Mount Lanayru Skyview Tower.

Farming for Light Dragon's Scale, Talon, Fang, Horn, and Spike items

Aside from the Master Sword quest, one of the major reasons you’ll want to get close to the Light Dragon is to farm materials. Materials from the Light Dragon have unique healing properties, but they are crucially also a major component in the Champion’s Leathers armor set - TOTK’s version of Link’s now-iconic Blue Tunic.

There's five items you can get from the Light Dragon, all obtained in different ways. If you're farming, you'll need two of each to upgrade the Champion's Tunic fully:

• Light Dragon's Scale: Obtained by hitting the Light Dragon's body in general. They'll either spawn on top of the dragon if you're standing atop it, or fall to Hyrule like a shooting star.
• Light Dragon's Talon: Obtained by hitting the clawed feet of the Light Dragon. They'll shoot off to land in Hyrule below, or you can dive to catch them in mid-air.
• Shard of Light Dragon's Fang: Obtained by shooting the Light Dragon in the face, around its lips, with an arrow. The Light Dragon doesn't generally open its mouth, but that doesn't matter - just hit it in the right place.
• Light Dragon's Horn: Obtained by hitting the horns on top of the Light Dragon - most easily accomplished by landing atop it and hitting it with your sword.
• Shard of Light Dragon's Spike: These grow along the spikes on the Light Dragon's back, respawning periodically. They can simply be picked up by walking down the dragon's back.

Here’s the important information for farming: you can get a new material from the Light Dragon every ten minutes. This has to be ten minutes of live play, not idling in menus. You can stand on the dragon’s back and let it fly around just fine, though. Around some sky islands, the Light Dragon will fly close to some flying enemies who might zero in on you - so if you plan to idle riding its back, be warned.

When on or approaching the Light Dragon, you can look at its horns or the spikes on its back - as they glow with a subtle luminous hue when the dragon is ready to be harvested. The screenshot above demonstrates the difference between when they're glowing and when they're not, inset. 

Like the travel times, this respawn counter is not affected by fast travel or passing time. However, if you can find the Light Dragon once, you can keep track of its position in the short term relatively easily with our Light Dragon route map above - as unless you wait a long time, it’ll never be too far away from where you left it.