Dumping your own Tears of the Kingdom NSP from a cartridge you purchased is legally grey (depending on your country's DMCA exemptions) but generally considered "fair use" for backup purposes.
Why does this matter? The Nintendo Switch officially supports microSD cards up to 2TB, but the console has a hard limit on usable game data. 16GB pushes the Switch hardware to its absolute limit. To put it in perspective, Breath of the Wild was roughly 13.4GB. That extra 3GB in TotK is packed with the physics engine for Fuse, the verticality of the Sky Islands, and the procedural nature of the Depths.
But if you’ve spent any time in the darker corners of the Nintendo Switch homebrew scene, you’ve likely seen a specific acronym floating around: .
It’s been over a year since Link descended from the floating islands of the Great Sky Island, and yet, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK) still dominates the conversation. Whether you are marvelling at the Ultrahand physics or getting lost in the Depths, this sequel to Breath of the Wild is a masterpiece of scope and engineering.
If you are looking at an NSP file for TotK, you will need a just to breathe. The "Sigpatches" Reality Here is where the conversation gets technical (and slightly grey). A stock Nintendo Switch cannot run an NSP file unless it is signed with Nintendo’s private encryption key.
The TotK NSP is a marvel of data compression, squeezing a world with three distinct layers (Sky, Surface, Depths) into just 16GB. But as the saying goes in the homebrew community: Just because you can run the NSP, doesn't mean you shouldn't buy the game.