Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s NPCs are actually Miis, confirms mud

It turns out that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild‘s character modeling really follows Nintendo’s Mii format. This means that an enterprising mud has invented a way to make NPCs appear on specific Miis.

Twitter user @HEYimHeroic, who cataloged more than a hundred official Miis on their Mii library site, discovered over the weekend that Breath of nature NPCs “use an advanced version of the Mii format” called UMii. “UMiis has almost all the same parameters as Wii U / 3DS Miis, with a few minor differences here and there,” Alice wrote on Reddit on Monday.

For the record, there has long been (since the launch of the game in 2017) speculation that Breath of nature use the Mii format to build NPCs to populate the vast open world of the game. Alice’s work confirms this and also reveals that Miis can be introduced directly into the game.

It is clear that the art style of a Mii and the characters in Breath of nature is very different; but the two use essentially the same properties and parameters. This is an easy way for the game to generate unique NPCs on a large scale. The mud found out what their Mii would look like there Breath of nature, although the game has the Mii hairstyle (which is not one of the Breath of nature hair options) in one that is supported. (Hats and other headgear are also just converted into different hairstyles.)

@HEYimHeroic credits the Breath of nature mud Discord with a lot of help, especially to test and provide screenshots of Mii’s conversions to game.

Mouse import to Breath of nature is not necessarily cumbersome, but it does require a modified Nintendo Switch, or Wii U, and then removes and edits a UMii file from the game to have the same features as the Mii file. It also replaces a specific NPC, so you have to find where they are and visit them in the world to see for yourself.