It’s one of our favorite locations in Hyrule: the Akkala Ancient Tech Lab. It’s where we bought the best armor ever – which we lovingly call the Ancient Cure-asses and Ancient Grievances – as well as the Ancient Shield, Ancient Bow, and many, many Ancient Arrows. Seriously, this place sells some good stuff. Who says old is worn out? Ancient is the new New! We spent a lot of time (and rupees and hard-to-get materials) at the northern lab.
But first, just like its southern counterpart in Hateno, you must open the lab for business. And there’s a similar requirement: You must carry a torch of blue flame from an ancient furnace nearby (or not so near), pausing to light lanterns along the way, until reaching and igniting the tech lab’s own furnace. Unlike the earlier quest, however, the path to the Akkala lab is riddled with enemies, mostly Moblins and wolves, but also a Guardian just down the hill. Consider lighting the Hateno lab’s furnace a warm-up for Akkala’s.
First, you’ll enter the lab and speak with the director, a goofy guy named Robbie with huge goggles. He reminds us a bit of Dr. Emmett Brown in Back to the Future. That is, if Dr. Brown also shared Marty McFly’s desire for rock stardom. And if the good doc was in love with a robot named Cherry and had a wife who was jealous of same.
Continuing the inanity, Robbie also requires proof of Link’s identity, not by inspecting his driver’s license, but rather by asking our poor hero to disrobe and show his scars. (Hello, HR Department?) Once Link’s in his underwear, Robbie will agree to help. But first, he needs Link to light the lab’s furnace out front. As it happens, there’s a torch inside the lab; we looked, pointedly, after our failure to note the torch in the Hateno lab. Nevertheless, we didn’t take this torch either. You see, we decided to follow Zelder Tip #1 below. And then we got distracted. You know how it goes.
Zelder Tip #1: Clear the area of enemies before you attempt to carry the torch. This tip is courtesy of gamers who came before us, discovered in Demelza’s research. In particular, the Guardian just down from the lab is right in the torch relay path. Absent this advice, we might well have given up on the lab’s furnace and its resulting goodies. Indeed, we have visions of Itzal dropping his torch when kicked by a Moblin and suffering an ignominious death, not once but multiple times, before throwing the torch down and the towel in, and declaring himself DONE. As it was, we thought we cleared the area a couple of times – maybe we were a mite slow cautious, and a few of the enemies came back. Maybe.
Zelder Tip #2: Be sure to finish the Hateno lab quest before this one, or all your work will be for naught. This tip, too, is courtesy of another gamer, who had the humility (or the sense of humor) to post a video online of his successful torch carrying but unsuccessful igniting of the Akkala furnace because he had not completed the Hateno quest first. (Incidentally, we searched in vain for this video on our second playthrough, so as to give credit here; we failed to find it again, although we enjoyed a couple of other videos including one of a barefoot Link ignoring Moblins entirely and jauntily completing the quest in perhaps one-tenth the time we did. And by “we” we mean Demelza; Itzal is too competitive to even look at such videos, much less enjoy it.)
Complicating matters, we had not yet activated the supremely daunting Akkala Tower, and thus our map was dark. So, after clearing the area of enemies – erm, mostly – Itzal surveyed the lay of the land, then began his torch-lighting ceremony with a tree branch.
Now, we’re not saying the land changed its lay as went on, but….let’s just say, we did not light the furnace in record time. What we did was persevere. We lit up the ENTIRE Akkala region, we’re pretty certain, in our attempts to find our way back to the lab without benefit of map. Fortunately, the lanterns once lit do stay so, even in the middle of a rainstorm, which, naturally, we encountered. We may have started a forest fire and wasted a lot of time, but the job got done.
Zelder Tip #3: Smaller saplings yield tree branches but larger trees give bundles of wood, so avoid the latter if you have lost, destroyed, or forgotten your torch. We had to bomb a couple – or five – or eight – young trees in our marathon run back to the lab. Indeed, we left a devastated ecosystem in our wake. And the pickings grew slimmer. Once, a wolf attacked, and Itzal, forgetting he was carrying a newly bombed tree branch, used it to defend himself, resulting in a horrified gasp from Demelza: “You used the tree branch!!” (Perhaps she would have been happier had Itzal succumbed to wolfbite.)
Eventually, as we got closer, the saplings were seriously depleted, so we sacrificed a spiked enemy club to the blue flames. As it happens, this came in handy: When a Moblin tried to sneak up on Itzal, he swatted the big guy with the flaming blue club and then continued on his relay. Again, Itzal insists, the job got done.
Once you’ve ignited the furnace, the Akkala tech lab is activated as a fast-travel point, and better still, you’ll be able to shop for ancient weapons, if you have the considerable cash and other requirements of ancient parts. But you’re given one gift for free: three ancient arrows. Use them wisely – they are dear, but very, very effective.
Suggested cocktail: We considered something in the blue family of beverages, but that’s better left to the gloomy and wet Zora domain, so we opted instead for a glass with a blue flame up the side to house our Lost Bank Martini. Guess where it gets its name?