Blood moon rises again

In Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, a "blood moon" happens every 3 or so in-game days. This is a cutscene where the sky turns red and the blood moon comes out. When this happens, all monsters you have killed in the world come back to life.

Iirc I think it's every 7 in-game days (unaffected by sleeping or resting at fires), and nearly 3 hours real-time, but when you kill enough enemies it happens automatically so if you do a lot of killing then blood moons will happen more often.
- I don't think it's on any sort of timer, 7 in game days is just a coincidence afaik.
  
  It helps the game refresh so it doesn't have as much data, about what monsters, items, etc are gone, to keep track of. It is a very clever double whammy feature that makes the game run better and more fun to play.
  
  That is genius. I love knowing little tricks that devs use like that.
  
  Do you know any other things of that sort?
  
  Morrowind would just soft reboot the Xbox during load screens. I think Blood Moons are a smarter move overall as it adds to the fun and gamer knowledge that enemies have respawned etc, but the Morrowind implementation was such that the player wouldn't notice the background soft reboot, because the screen retained a static loading screen during the process.
  
  Also Skyrim (PS3 at least), just added the info tracking the game state to the save file which made it incredibly large after many hours of playing so some found it unplayable.
  
  That said there's evidence that most night time blood moons are scripted (i.e. for gameplay), and anything you see during the day is a "panic" one, added later in the coding timeline, for the memory free up purpose. Blood moons weren't originally planned for that (or they were maybe but timing wasn't implemented?), but they work well for it.

In the latest Legend of Zelda games there's a regular event that takes place every in-game month called the Blood Moon. When it happens all of the enemies that the player had previously defeated come back to life. The joke here is the the dirty dishes were cleaned, but the blood moon reincarnated them.

I so overcomplicated this meme i my head coz if you cook during blood moon the food gets extra buff and I thought the dishes are there coz everyone is cooking 🤦
- Wait WHAT!? Cooking during the blood moon buffs the meal!? Where were we supposed to learn that?
  
  You can cook anywhere. If you are on the go use zonai stove from the ball. The food will have extra hearts like when you put a gold apple in it
  
  No idea how I found this out, probably just from being on the BotW subreddit, but the specific timings are 23:30 - 00:00. This guarantees a crit effect from your meals (more duration, more hearts etc).
  
  In my head it was informed in a loading screen or by an NPC but I can't find anything online that confirms this, so guess I just came across a thread once!
  
  I think 5 x Hearty Durians is 20 temporary hearts normally but under a blood moon I got 24 temporary hearts in one recipie.
  
  I really dislike the cooking mechanics, so I try to avoid it as much as possible. It means I also avoid fights, though, or else try to get really good at dodging. But 20 temp hearts? That's incredible. I didn't even know such a big buff was possible.
  
  It helps to just go to Faron tower, glide across to the lizalfos and take em out. Lots of durian trees there, pick em up and make a good few hearty meals. All the extra hearts means you'll need to cook less.
  
  I'm too lazy to check if this is real. Would someone verify this plz 🙏?
  
  It's 100% true. I haven't played in a while but yeah, I would always try to take advantage of it when I could
so can you ever defeat all enemies or are you not supposed to?
- You're not supposed to. You need enemies around to be able to farm them for materials.
- You can't. Apparently when you kill a ton of enemies really fast the blood moon happens quicker. At least according to some other person on this thread
  
  I once saw a Reddit post where someone killed so many monsters the game had an emergency blood moon in the middle of the day
- Enemies you defeat will stay gone until the next Blood Moon, which triggers after you defeat a certain percentage of enemies in the world. It's designed to keep the game exciting and fresh so there are always enemies around.
  
  oh I'm used to other games where ordinary enemies simply respawn when you leave the area

In open world games, there is usually a mechanism to reset the game world in part or in full after a period of time. This frees up system memory and prevents the game world from becoming barren.

The Zelda open world games (breath of the wild and tears of the Kingdom), are unique in that this mechanic is given a canonical explanation, rather than simply happening in the background as with other open world games.

At midnight (in-game) after a set number of similarly in-game days (or immediately if the game is about to crash) an event called the Blood Moon happens, where all enemies and most items are reverted to their state before you came along and kicked ass.

The joke here is that the dirty dishes was the prior state before the person cleaned them, hence after a blood moon, they are dirty again.