Published 1 minute ago

The Legend of Zelda fans show off all the impressive devices they’ve put together using Autobuild

Image: Nintendo via kmarkow / Reddit

Sign in to your Polygon account

It looks like any other contraption, jumbled together in a neon whir will inevitably push Link forward. Steadily, the giant fan cuts through the water as Link holds on to the steering wheel. What’s this? The ship is about to hit a wall. Why isn’t Link pulling away?

Easy. He doesn’t have to. This jalopy is an all-terrain monster that uses its wheels to climb walls at a 90-degree angle. It can do everything, because it was designed to. The engineers of Hyrule regularly dazzle like this, even years after the original release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. They can’t help but share their genius inventions with the world. It’s also, undoubtedly, a consequence of the Switch 2 version of Tears of the Kingdom, which allows players to easily share Autobuild creations via QR codes. Inspiration and iteration are as constant as they are inevitable now.

Tanks, airships, planes—these are all ideas that a typical player might come up with, except that Hyrule engineers tend to do it better. One engineer named Garrett Thompson tells Polygon that their award-winning hover bike was the product of a year’s worth of testing and tinkering, all in the hopes of producing the smallest and most agile aircraft possible. Called Tiny Dancer, the build was an attempt to perfect the quiintessiential Tears of the Kingdom hover bike. Nearly everyone who plays the game will, at one point, try and build a bike. Maybe the end product looks like anything *except *a bike, but that’s the ideal. Tiny Dancer is probably the closest anyone has come to making a bike that can turn on a rupee. As you can see below, the device can make some wildly impressive tight turns. Best of all, it’s outfitted so that Tiny Dancer won’t despawn just because you go out exploring.

“Tiny control inputs can make precise adjustments to the steering, and I have captured many videos where I just pilot the Tiny Dancer through a winding cave, or land it on a precarious perch,” Thompson boasts. This is him being modest. In a different conversation, he casually drops the line that he believes he has “revolutionized motorcycle construction in the game.” Tiny Dancer can fly perfectly straight, and is optimized to only lose a meter of altitude about every ten seconds. No wonder, then, that Hyrule engineers tend to speak in grand terms when they upload trailers for their new inventions.

“Today I present my new magnum opus,” declares creator chesepuf, as he shows off a rail jet that moves so fast, the game has trouble loading. This is a feature, not a bug. “Fast travel without a loading screen,” a commenter chimes in.

Hyrule engineers stay sharp by holding monthly themed contests that challenge the community to build the most impressive inventions possible. In October, for example, the prompt was to concoct a build that could abduct victims. While the public got a taste of this concept when torturing poor Koroks was in vogue, engineers take it to an entirely different level. With the help of glitches, a Hyrule engineer might trap a Bokoblin inside an invisible fortress that can be displayed wherever Link sees fit. The things that win aren’t always practical; flashiness can win over judges if the creation is entertaining enough. Thompson recalls making flying castles, a robot that breathes fire, ice, and beams, and even a recreation of hungry, hungry hippos that eat their prey for the monthly contests. He’s placed plenty of times, but he’s continually motivated to hit first place — hence the year’s worth of work on Tiny Dancer.

With Switch 2, the community’s creative impulses have kicked into overdrive now that the hardware can actually handle all the chaos happening on-screen. This kicked off a wave of physics-related builds as players push to see how far the latest version of the game will let them go. The community finds new glitches to aid their efforts all the time. Did you know that you can use shrine levers to affect the physics of the entire game, for example?

In some ways, having such deep knowledge of Tears of the Kingdom allows engineers to move about Hyrule as if they were gods. If they want to make an army of fish attack their enemies, they can — with homing carts. Annoying bosses are dealt with bespoke weapons that make the battles look easy. Anything is possible.

One of the most popular posts this year sees an engineer putting together the biggest ship the game can handle. Naturally, it’s called the Titanic. “This one isn’t sinking though,” the post declares. One month later, seemingly drunk on their powers of creation, the creator sunk the Titanic just for the sheer spectacle of it.