Dondons in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, explained

In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, you may encounter dondons, intriguing elephant-like tusked beasts in southern Akkala.

You find the dondons as part of the “Potential Princess Sightings” quest, “The Beast and the Princess,” but the quest doesn’t really tell you what they do. Zelda is known to have saved these beasts, providing sanctuary for them, but they actually do have a use: They can give you gemstones, like diamonds, rubies, and sapphires.

You can’t ride them, sadly, but you can feed them luminous stones. We describe the process below.

Where to find the dondons in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Graphic: Jeffrey Parkin, Julia Lee/Polygon | Source images: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo

The dondons are at a sanctuary directly north of Lakeside Stable. You can glide straight to where they are from Joju-u-u Shrine, if you look for the caretaker’s cooking pot in the distance. (Admittedly it’s kind of hard to see due to the murky fog around the area, but if you glide north, it’ll pop in.)

How to use dondons in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

If you have lots of luminous stone, you can feed dondons these stones and in return, they’ll poop out some gemstones. Based on some of our tests, you can get flint, amber, opal, topaz, sapphires, rubies, and diamonds, but it’s all up to your own luck. This isn’t a super solid way to grab gemstones, but since it takes time, you may as well test your luck if you have tons of luminous stones.

Before you dump all your luminous stones into dondons, note that you do need a ton of them to upgrade Radiant Armor, if you’re planning on doing that.

Feed the dondons by doing the following:

1. Place a luminous stone in front of the dondon you want to feed.
2. Watch as the dondon eats the stone.
3. Leave the area. (You can go do something else, but they won’t poop in front of you.)
4. After approximately 10 minutes, come back.
5. Collect your loot, which will be around the dondon sanctuary, but not necessarily exactly where the dondon was when you left.
6. Repeat as desired.

And that’s all there is to it! There’s no other use for dondons that we know of, but this is ain’t too shabby.