Mario Odyssey moons: the complete collector’s guide and design breakdown

Mario Odyssey moons: how progression actually works in Super Mario Odyssey

The shortest useful answer for anyone searching for mario odyssey moons is this: the moons are the single resource that drives every system in Super Mario Odyssey, from unlocking new kingdoms to gating costumes, from fueling amiibo interactions to measuring completion percentage. There are 836 regular moons plus 114 shop moons, distributed across roughly fifteen major kingdoms, two mini-kingdoms, and the post-game Mushroom Kingdom. The design uses the moon count as a soft progression gate: you can move to the next kingdom once you have enough moons to power the Odyssey, but you do not need every moon in a region before leaving. Understanding that one fact changes how you read the rest of the game, because almost every other system – movement unlocks, snapshot rewards, the Balloon World minigame, the hint system – is built on top of the same underlying moon economy.

This page is written for players who want a complete collector’s view of mario odyssey moons, and for developers and designers who want to understand how a single collectible can structure an entire 3D platformer. The first half works as a practical guide: how moons are found, how the region-by-region economy plays out, what tools the game gives you to find the hard ones, and how the post-game adds an entirely new layer. The second half looks under the hood at the design decisions, the cost of moon-gated progression, and the patterns other games have borrowed from this system. If you only need the quick list, the tables near the end give the regional totals and the unlock thresholds at a glance.

The three moon categories and why they exist

Before chasing mario odyssey moons, it helps to understand the three internal categories the game uses, because the way you find them is completely different for each.

The first category is story moons. These are the moons you earn by progressing through the main objective of each kingdom: reaching a boss door, defeating a boss, activating a story checkpoint, or finishing a set-piece sequence. They tend to be linear and clearly signposted, and the hint system labels them with a story icon. New players will earn a large share of these simply by playing through the game normally.

The second category is region moons. These are the moons tied to a specific kingdom and only available there, but not part of the main story. They include the purple coins, the seeds, the broodal fights in their bonus rooms, the slots, the moon shards, the hidden chests, the 8-bit pixel art, the volleyball matches, the Jump-Rope Endurance runs, the rolling rocks, the RC car challenges, the hat trigonometry puzzles, the moon rock fragments, the snapshot rewards, and dozens of one-off oddities. They are the bulk of the count and the bulk of the play time.

The third category is shop moons. These are paid moons you buy from the Crazy Cap stores in every kingdom and in the post-game Mushroom Kingdom. Each store has a rotating stock that changes as you buy, and a small set of moons that only appear once you have a certain costume equipped. Shop moons are the closest thing the game has to a hard currency sink, and they are the reason running out of coins late in the game feels like a real failure state.

How the moon count gates the rest of the game

Super Mario Odyssey uses moons as a soft currency for almost every system, not just progression. Knowing which gate fires when helps you plan a run.

• Power moons fuel the Odyssey. Each new kingdom has a threshold, and you cannot depart for the next world until you meet it. The thresholds are deliberately low compared to the moons actually available in a region, so the gates feel like encouragement rather than restriction.
• The number of moons you have collected globally changes the music in the main hub. Once a threshold is reached, the background music evolves, and the hub itself reveals new doors and shortcuts.
• Costumes, sticker decorations, and souvenir items unlock at specific moon counts, and a handful of items only become available in the shop once the global moon count crosses a higher threshold.
• The post-game Mushroom Kingdom opens after the main story credits, and a layered sub-area inside it only opens once you have collected enough moons to power a separate rocket.
• The Hint Art, the Balloon World, and the Luigi balloon-minigame all require moons to unlock, and the Balloon World leaderboard only opens after a specific global total.

The interesting design choice is that the gates are never the real difficulty. The real difficulty is finding the last few moons in each kingdom, which the game handles by adding systems, not by raising the moon threshold.

The regional moon economy at a glance

The following table summarises the regular moon count for each major kingdom. The numbers are based on the release version of Super Mario Odyssey and the post-launch patches; some regional counts can vary by one or two moons depending on whether you count amiibo-only moons, which depend on the amiibo you own. Shop moons are listed separately because they are a global resource, not a regional one.

For a fuller player-facing reference, Nintendo’s own Super Mario Odyssey page on Wikipedia keeps a list of the kingdom counts, including the shop moons. The German outlet 4Players’ Super Mario Odyssey review also discusses the regional structure of the moon economy, especially the way Sand Kingdom and Metro Kingdom are padded with side content to extend play time.

The move-set as a moon-finding tool

One of the smartest design decisions in Super Mario Odyssey is that almost every movement upgrade is also a moon-finding tool. This is a more interesting design statement than it looks, and it is part of why mario odyssey moons feel satisfying to find even when the task itself is small.

The first major move, the long jump, is unlocked in the Cascade Kingdom. Once you have it, dozens of platforming gaps that were previously un-crossable open up, and a large number of moons become reachable. The cap throw, the cap hover, the ground pound, the wall jump, the roll, the hat-wearing transformations, the crouch-walk, the dive, and the three hat upgrades each open a different category of hidden moons. By the time you have the full kit, the game is essentially telling you to backtrack through every kingdom with new eyes, which is exactly the kind of double-dipping the moon economy is designed to encourage.

For players trying to optimise a run, the order of move unlocks becomes a planning tool. In practice, the move kit is fully assembled by roughly the time you reach Wooded Kingdom, which is also when the regional moons start to feel like the real meat of the game. From that point on, the limiting factor is not your movement, it is your observation.

Regional breakdown: where the hard moons live

Rather than rehash a full region-by-region walkthrough, this section focuses on the patterns that show up where moons are hardest to find, and on the regional quirks that trip up even experienced players.

Sand Kingdom: the time-gated region

Sand Kingdom is the largest early-game region by moon count, and the only one with a meaningful time-of-day mechanic. A large set of moons only appear at night, including the wedding dress quest line, the Jaxi race, the post-jaxi town section, and several inverted pyramid moons. Players who move through the kingdom in a single sitting tend to miss the night-only moons because the time-of-day change happens on a timer, not on a trigger. The lesson is general: when a region asks you to come back later, it is usually a system-level request, not a side note.

Metro Kingdom: the festival chain

Metro Kingdom is the densest region in the game for events that span multiple sub-areas. The festival quest chain, the city roof chain, the underground chain, the carnival games, the band performance, and the scarecrow all share moon rewards and have to be done in a specific order for the count to register cleanly. This is one of the more interesting design choices: the game refuses to flag the chain as complete until the final step, so the player has to keep checking the kingdom map for new icons. The map itself is the puzzle.

Wooded Kingdom: the tracking bee

Wooded Kingdom is a stealth and tracking region. The flower-snatching bee requires you to lure a sequence of bees through specific flower patches, and each successful lure unlocks a moon. The trick is that the bee resets on a long timer, so if you fail the sequence you have to wait or restart. This is one of the rare regions where the difficulty of finding moons comes from a soft timer rather than a platforming challenge.

Moon Kingdom: the boss and the post-credits

Moon Kingdom looks like the end of the game, but most of its moons are tied to a layered set of side activities that only become available after the main story. Players who skip the post-game content here will under-count by a large margin. The wedding sequence, the secret rooms, and the costume-gated moons all stack up.

Dark Side and Darker Side

The final challenge is split across two layered areas that contain the densest concentration of difficult platforming moons in the game. The Darker Side gauntlet in particular is a stress test of every move the game has taught you, and its moons act as both a difficulty spike and a soft skill gate. Reaching the end is a separate challenge from finding every moon inside it.

How the hint system actually works

The For additional context, Hint system in Super Mario Odyssey is the most misunderstood tool in the game. It does not show you where the moon is. It shows you an in-game object, a painting, a map, or a hint coin that, when interpreted correctly, points at a moon. The quality of the hints is uneven, and the time you save by using them is not as large as the time you spend finding them.

Most hint moons are essentially: find the painting, decode the painting, find the location it points to, find the moon at that location. The hint system is therefore a puzzle about puzzle-solving, not a search function. Some hints, especially the “talk to this NPC” hints, are useful. The cryptic ones are usually faster to brute force by walking the entire kingdom, especially if you have all movement upgrades.

For completionists, the practical approach is to clear the obvious non-hint moons first, then run every hint in one pass. Mixing the two tends to waste time, because you end up re-treading the same areas when the hint points to a place you already visited.

Coins, purple coins, and the role of money

Coins exist in Super Mario Odyssey for one reason: to buy shop moons. They are not a progression currency, and they do not gate any story content. The game uses them as a soft, parallel economy that runs alongside the moon economy, and the two only meet inside the Crazy Cap stores.

Purple coins are the local currency for regional shop moons. Each kingdom has its own purple coin total, and most purple coin moons ask you to find a stash of one hundred in a single run. They are the most grind-heavy moons in the game, especially in the larger kingdoms, and they are the only consistent place where the game expects you to replay a sub-area.

For a player running out of time, the rule of thumb is: if you have purple coins in your inventory and you have not bought the regional shop moons, you are leaving moons on the table. If you have gold coins and you have not bought the global shop moons in the Mushroom Kingdom, you are also leaving moons on the table.

Snapshot mode and the hidden picture moons

Snapshot mode is a moon-finding system, not just a photo tool. There are moons that only appear once you take a specific photo: a moon in a fixed frame at a fixed time of day, a moon in a specific camera angle, a moon that appears only when you frame two characters at once, and so on. These moons are technically optional, but they are also some of the more interesting ones because they require the player to look at the world as a set of compositions rather than a set of locations.

For most players, the snapshot moons are the last category to clear, because they require experimentation rather than exploration. For designers, this is one of the more interesting examples in the game of a system that turns a peripheral feature into a content layer.

Costumes, amiibo, and the hidden shop stock

The Crazy Cap stores have a hidden stock layer. Certain costumes only appear in the shop once you have collected enough moons globally, and certain shop moons are only available once you have the matching costume equipped. The system is designed to encourage completionism by giving you a reason to revisit a region with a different look, but the practical effect is that the last ten percent of the game’s moons are tied to outfit grinding rather than exploration.

Amiibo are a separate layer again. The For additional context, wedding-themed Mario and Peach amiibo, the Bowser amiibo, and a small set of others grant access to moons that no other path provides. For completionists, this is the only category that the game cannot be fully finished without external hardware, which is worth knowing before you commit to a hundred-percent run.

Post-game content: the Mushroom Kingdom layer

After the credits, the Mushroom Kingdom becomes a separate, denser region with its own set of moons. The Kingdom contains classic-costume missions that replay modified versions of the earlier kingdoms, boss rematches that scale up the difficulty, a series of mini-quests attached to Peach, Bowser, and a handful of NPCs, and a layered sub-area that requires a separate moon total to unlock.

The most interesting design decision in the post-game is the way it uses the same resources in a different mode. Every movement upgrade, every capture ability, and every shop moon is still relevant, but the missions demand a higher level of mechanical control. The game never tells you this directly; it just stops handing you the easy moons.

Balloon World: the leaderboard you do not need

Balloon World is a separate minigame that becomes available once your global moon count is high enough. In Hide It mode, you place balloons in each kingdom. In Find It mode, you chase other players’ balloons. The mode has its own reward moons, but its main function is to keep the world map populated after completion. It is also one of the more interesting community design decisions: a single-player game that ships with a leaderboard layer because the underlying collectible economy is rich enough to support it.

What the moon economy teaches a designer

For developers, the mario odyssey moons system is a useful case study in a soft, single-resource progression model. There are five patterns worth pulling out.

• A single resource can drive story, exploration, cosmetic, and meta progression at the same time, as long as each system reads the same number for a different reason.
• Soft gates are more sustainable than hard gates in an open 3D platformer. The Odyssey’s kingdom thresholds are low enough that they encourage leaving, not grinding.
• Move unlocks are the cleanest possible content unlock. Each one retroactively creates new content without shipping new levels.
• A hint system that requires decoding teaches the player to read the world more carefully, even when the hints fail.
• Post-game content should re-use the same verbs in a higher-difficulty mode, not introduce new mechanics. The Mushroom Kingdom respects this rule.

For comparison, this kind of single-resource model is unusual in 3D platformers, where most competitors split the economy across coins, stars, and tokens. The decision to fold everything into one collectible makes the game’s design easier to teach and harder to outgrow.

Comparing the moon economy to other Nintendo collectors

If you have played other major Nintendo 3D platformers, the comparison is interesting. The table below sets the mario odyssey moons system against two reference points: the star system in Super Mario 64 and the spirit system in Super Mario Galaxy. The numbers reflect the release versions of the games.

The shift from a hard star gate to a soft moon gate is the most consequential design change in the series. It allows the game to support a much higher total count without punishing the player for not being a perfectionist on the first pass, and it allows the post-game to scale naturally with completion rather than introducing a separate currency.

A practical route for a first-time completionist

If you are running a first-time completionist pass and want to keep the time per moon roughly flat, the order of operations matters more than the route through any single kingdom.

1. Run each kingdom for the story moons first, then for the obvious non-story moons, then for the purple coin moons, then for the hint moons, then for the snapshot moons.
2. Buy shop moons as you go. Do not save up for a single end-game purchase run unless you are intentionally role-playing a low-currency challenge.
3. Do not backtrack into a region with new moves until you have finished at least the next two regions. Move unlocks compound, and a clean second pass is faster than a series of partial passes.
4. Use the in-game hint system only after you have explored the region manually. The hints are a quality-of-life tool, not a search function.
5. Save the Mushroom Kingdom post-game for last, and use it as a soft skill test. The missions there assume you have internalised the move set.

This is not the only valid order, but it produces the most even time-per-moon curve, which is what most completionists actually care about.

How the moon count reads in summary screens

When the game shows you a percentage complete, that percentage is a soft completion estimate based on the regional moon totals, not a hard measurement. The actual completion percentage depends on which moons you have and which moons you have not, and the game does not expose the full denominator in any single place. This is one of the more interesting quiet design decisions: the game avoids telling you how far you are from done, because that number would change how you approach the next region.

For players who want a real number, the in-game kingdom map shows the regional totals, and the Mushroom Kingdom shop shows the global total. Together those two numbers tell you almost everything you need to know about your progress without spoiling the design intent.

What the post-game is for

The post-game content in Super Mario Odyssey is not designed for first-time players. It is designed to give completionist players a reason to keep playing after the credits, and to give less completionist players a soft way back into the world without locking the main campaign behind a hard gate. The Mushroom Kingdom is a quiet reward: it gives you back the early game you liked, but in a denser form and with a higher skill expectation.

This is also where the moon economy pays off. Because the same collectible drives both the main game and the post-game, the post-game can be added on top of the existing systems without breaking them. The Dark Side and Darker Side gauntlets, the boss rematches, the costume missions, and the snapshot rewards all feed into the same total, which is why a player who finished the main campaign at around 500 moons can keep playing without feeling like they are starting over.

Common traps in a 100 percent run

A few patterns show up consistently when players push for full completion. The list below is a sanity check, not a route, and the items appear in roughly the order they bite first-time completionists.

• Missing the night-only moons in Sand Kingdom because you do not stay in the region long enough to see the time change.
• Forgetting to revisit the Crazy Cap store in each region after buying the first batch of moons, so the rotated stock never appears.
• Skipping the snapshot moons until the very end, when the mental overhead of framing a shot is higher.
• Treating the hint system as a search function, which makes the hint moons feel more difficult than they are.
• Missing the costume-gated shop moons because the matching costume was never equipped when the shop was visited.
• Not running the post-game Mushroom Kingdom at all, which costs you a large set of moons in a region that looks like a hub.

What changes when you replay the game

Because the moon count is the single number that drives every system, a second playthrough feels fundamentally different even if the levels are the same. The first time through, you are finding moons. The second time through, you are managing them. You know which moons to leave for later, which moons to buy, and which moons are tied to outfits you have not unlocked. The hint system reads differently, because you have already seen the paintings. The snapshot system reads differently, because you already know the compositions. The game has not changed, but the player has, and the moon economy is structured to make that visible.

What the moon system does not do well

No design is without trade-offs. The moon economy is dense, but it is also a little unforgiving for players who want a clear “you finished the game” signal. The Mushroom Kingdom is rewarding, but it is also the only region that requires external knowledge of which costume unlocks which shop moon. Theamiibo moons are fun for players who own the figures, but they leave a permanent gap in the completion percentage for everyone else. None of these are deal-breakers, but they are worth knowing about before you commit to a full run.

Frequently asked questions

How many mario odyssey moons are there in total?

There are 836 regular moons across the fifteen main kingdoms and the post-game areas, plus 114 shop moons for a combined 950. If you count the Dark Side and Darker Side gauntlets and the classic Mushroom Kingdom costume missions, the regional totals add up to slightly more than the headline number. The Mushroom Kingdom shop exposes the global total, and each kingdom’s map screen exposes the regional total.

Do I have to collect every mario odyssey moon to finish the story?

No. The story is finishable with a small fraction of the total moon count, because the kingdom departure thresholds are deliberately low. You only need a global total that exceeds the cost of the next ticket, which the game sets well below the regional supply. Players who want to see the ending will not need to grind.

Where do I find the hidden mario odyssey moons in each kingdom?

Each kingdom has a small set of moons that only appear after a specific move unlock, costume, or time of day. The reliable approach is to clear the obvious moons first, then re-explore the region with the new move, then check the Crazy Cap store for rotated stock. The hint system is useful but not a search function, and the snapshot moons are best handled in a separate pass.

Are there any mario odyssey moons that require amiibo?

Yes. A small set of moons is only available through specific wedding-themed, Bowser-themed, and Mario-themed amiibo. The exact moons vary by region, and they are the only category of moon that the game cannot be fully finished without external hardware.

What is the difference between purple coin moons and regular mario odyssey moons?

Purple coin moons are regional shop moons that you buy from the Crazy Cap store in each kingdom after collecting 100 of that region’s purple coins. They count toward the regional and global totals, but they are funded by a local currency rather than by exploration. They are the most grind-heavy category in the game.

Why does the mario odyssey moons percentage not match my in-game progress?

Because the percentage is a soft estimate that mixes story, region, shop, snapshot, and post-game moons. The game does not expose the full denominator in a single place, so the percentage on the map screen will not always match the number you can compute manually from the regional totals. This is by design: the percentage is meant to be a progress signal, not a hard measurement.

What is the fastest way to find the last mario odyssey moons in a kingdom?

Start with the moons that require the move set you already have, then move to the moons that need the snapshot or hint system. If you still have gaps, the local purple coin stash and the Crazy Cap store rotation are usually the last two layers. Mixed approaches tend to waste time because they re-tread the same areas more than once.

Do mario odyssey moons carry over to a New Game Plus run?

No. Super Mario Odyssey does not have a New Game Plus mode. The game has a post-game layer in the Mushroom Kingdom, and the Dark Side and Darker Side gauntlets act as the closest thing to a replay incentive. Coins, moons, and costumes are saved in the main file, but the kingdom states do not reset.

Which kingdom has the most mario odyssey moons?

Sand Kingdom has the highest single-region regular moon count, followed by Metro Kingdom and Wooded Kingdom. The Mushroom Kingdom post-game and the Dark Side gauntlet add a comparable number when combined, but they are split across multiple areas rather than a single region.

Are shop mario odyssey moons required for 100 percent completion?

Technically no, because the game’s percentage estimate does not include every shop moon. For a manual completion count, you usually include them, and most completionist guides do. The shop moons are also the cleanest way to convert gold coins into progress late in the game.