Collecting Star Coins in Skyloft
Skyward Sword's star coins are one of those tedious but rewarding side objectives. There are 30 in Skyloft alone, and if you want every single one, you need to know where they hide and which methods actually work. I spent an afternoon running through this process because the game doesn't help you track them properly. The minimap shows nothing for star coins, so you're basically flying blind until you memorize the layouts. Let me walk through what I found after multiple attempts. The first thing you need to understand is that not all star coins can be collected on your first visit. Several require you to return later with upgrades, which means planning your routes around gear availability is essential. The ones you can grab early are spread across the central island, the house areas, and the marketplace zone. I'll list the specific locations below. Central Plaza and Around the Temple: One star coin sits on top of the fountain in the center of Skyloft. You need to use the (grapple point) near the fountain to reach it. Another is behind the temple, tucked against a wall that most players walk past without noticing. The third is up on a rooftop near the instrument shop, accessible by chaining grapple points along the buildings.
Residential Area: Several coins cluster in the housing district. One is inside the music teacher's house, floating above the piano. Another is on a shelf in the house to the right of the temple entrance. These are straightforward but easy to miss if you don't enter each building. Marketplace: The market area has three coins in quick succession. One hangs from a stall awning, another is near the fish merchant, and the third requires you to grapple across the market square from the central pillar. I found this last one particularly annoying because the grapple point is easy to overshoot if you're not careful with timing. Upper Skyloft: This is where things get complicated. The upper level requires you to have the upgrade fully charged. Two coins sit on platforms that only appear when you reach a certain altitude, and another is behind a breakable rock near the loftwing docking area. I lost count of how many times I missed the platform spawns because the timing is tighter than it appears on screen.
Under Skyloft: Yes, there are star coins below the main island too. You need to glide down from the edge and hover carefully. One is near the water surface, and another is behind some pillars in the lower cave system. These are among the most frustrating to get because the wind current pushes you off course constantly. I had to use a technique where I'd approach from the opposite direction of the wind to compensate, which took me several tries to perfect. Here is something most guides won't tell you: you do not need to collect all star coins before advancing the story. In fact, many of the harder ones become significantly easier to reach after you acquire the Boomerang and the improvements from later in the game. I returned on my second playthrough specifically for the ones I'd missed, and what took me forty-five minutes the first time took me about twelve minutes the second time. The difference was entirely about having the right tools. Another counter-intuitive detail: star coins do not respawn if you leave and come back. They are one-time pickups per save file. If you skip one intentionally or accidentally fly past it without noticing, it stays missing until you reload a save from before that area. I learned this the hard way after realizing I had been searching for a coin for twenty minutes that simply wasn't there because I'd already collected it on a previous run and didn't realize it.
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My workaround for the ones I consistently missed involved using a different approach angle. For the coins near the edges of Skyloft that are affected by wind, I'd start my glide from a higher altitude and approach more gradually rather than diving straight at them. This gave me extra time to adjust my trajectory mid-air. It's a small adjustment but it reduced my failure rate from roughly fifty percent to about ten percent on those particular coins. If you want a complete list with exact coordinates, there are community-maintained maps available online that plot each coin's position relative to landmarks. I found the ones on Zelda Wiki to be the most accurate after cross-referencing with my own notes. Individual guides vary in reliability, so I recommend checking at least two sources before committing to a search route. The entire star coin hunt in Skyloft took me approximately three hours across two visits. A first-time player with no prior knowledge should budget closer to five hours if they want to be thorough. The returns are mostly cosmetic unlocks, so if that doesn't interest you, you can safely ignore most of them and focus on the main story progression instead. The game will not block you from completing it without every star coin.
