How to beat the Water Temple boss in Tears of the Kingdom

The entirety of the main Zora questline in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom involves you trying to locate the source of the sludge falling from the sky and polluting the waters of Zora’s Domain below. With the help of the ever-popular Prince Sidon of the Zora, you venture through the sky islands above Zora’s Domain and reach the Water Temple, where you tackle a variety of puzzles to activate four faucets. After accomplishing this, you find that the culprit behind the sludge is the Mucktorok, a silly-looking octopus monster who can take the form of a shark made of the stuff. This guide will go through different strategies you can use against this boss waiting at the end of the Water Temple in Tears of the Kingdom.

Tips for fighting the Mucktorok

Mucktorok’s pattern

For much of its first phase, the Mucktorok will swim around in its shark form before performing one of a handful of attacks. One of those attacks simply sees it charging toward you, while another has it spewing a concentrated beam of sludge, both of which you can run to the side to avoid. Additionally, it can splash into the ground to create a circular wave of sludge that travels outward. Thanks to the low gravity of the Water Temple, you can easily leap over this wave as well as the aforementioned sludge beam if you wish.

General strategies

The primary goal of this fight involves splashing water onto the sludge shark to douse it away, allowing you to attack the Mucktorok in its base form. You can achieve this using items like Splashfruit, ChuChu Jelly, or a Hydrant, but the game primarily wants you to use Sidon’s water projectile for the job. Normally, you need to hit the sludge shark with water twice to leave the Mucktorok vulnerable. But with Sidon’s projectile, you can fully douse the sludge shark with just a single hit.

This may seem like the optimal strategy, but the shark’s fast movement combined with the water projectile’s cooldown after each use makes it trickier than you might assume. Staying close to the Mucktorok and launching the projectile when it stops to attack you will make the strategy more likely to succeed.

After you wash away the shark, the Mucktorok will get on its stubby little legs and run like a headless chicken away from you. At this point, it’s slow enough that you can easily catch up to it and dish out as much damage as possible before it conjures up its shark form again. But if it’s a bit far away from you, shoot an arrow at it to stop it in its tracks.

Screenshot via PC Invasion

Second phase

Once you knock the Mucktorok down to half health, it will coat the entire arena in piles of sludge, which can severely hinder your movement when stepped on. It also gains a new attack where it spits out several balls of sludge that rain from the sky, leaving more sludge piles in their wake. Running to the side should be enough to dodge the sludge balls, but the Mucktorok can end up leaving behind so many sludge piles that it becomes a huge hassle to move around.

Naturally, water-based items and Sidon’s water projectile will be essential in clearing away the sludge. In particular, attaching a Hydrant to one of your shields or weapons helps greatly with cleaning the sludge in an efficient manner, giving you much more space to move around.

Now, whenever you get rid of the sludge shark, the Mucktorok will hop around erratically while creating more sludge piles. You can’t simply run up and hit it like you could before, and trying to stun it with an arrow while grounded can prove a bit of a nightmare. Fortunately, jumping under the low gravity of the Water Temple will give you enough height to trigger bullet time, allowing you to aim at the Mucktorok mostly effortlessly.

In fact, the low gravity is incredibly exploitable throughout the entirety of this initial encounter with the Mucktorok. With such easy and constant access to bullet time, it becomes remarkably simple to pelt away at the boss’s shark form with Splashfruit or ChuChu Jelly-infused arrows. If you have enough of these resources, you can trivialize the fight this way.

Rematch in the Depths

After you first defeat the Mucktorok in the Water Temple, you can challenge it again at various locations in the Depths. You’re never asked to do these encounters for any kind of sidequest or one-time reward. They mainly exist to provide you with extra crystallized charges and other materials as well as an excuse to fight the boss as many times as you want.

Although the Mucktorok itself behaves exactly the same as before, these optional fights in the Depths have a crucial difference in that they operate under normal gravity. This makes it a bit more challenging to avoid some of its attacks, particularly the sludge wave, which you can no longer jump over. Instead, you can either run away from the wave or douse part of it with water to create a gap to slip through.

The standard gravity also means that you no longer have instant access to bullet time. This means you have to either access it through other means, such as after boosting upward with a rocket shield, or simply aim at the boss while grounded like normal. This becomes especially problematic once the Mucktorok starts jumping around everywhere in the second phase. It’s best to save yourself the hassle by fusing an arrow to a homing eyeball monster part or to an item with a wide area of effect like the Bomb Flower.

Beating the boss again after the Water Temple will reward you with several Octo Balloons and other standard Octorok drops you can utilize as you continue to explore Tears of the Kingdom’s dense world. Certainly not as useful as the unique fusible monster parts you can get from the other boss rematches, but it’s not a bad way to farm those drops if you want them.

Screenshot via PC Invasion