When Nintendo started showing footage from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Hyrule’s hero navigated the world using simple vehicles and gliders. I never thought Link would drive around in a hot rod spewing flames – and instead of destroying the environment with gas emissions, this car goes old-fashioned and just sets everything on fire. I didn’t think I’d see Link flying around on one either Helicopter made of wooden boards and fans glued together with magical glue, resulting in a creation that would barely stand up to inspection.
And yet it is precisely such inventions that fill it Hyrule Engineering Club, a Reddit forum that has more than 20,000 members and is constantly growing, an estimated 1,500 members per day. In the posts filling this subreddit, Link has a mech suit that fires lasers, a Segway, and a Star Wars podracer; You’ll see blueprints for Bokoblin traps, Zonai rechargeable batteries, and lawnmowers for harvesting Hylian rice. The inventors of the Hyrule Engineering Club are playing 4D chess while I’m still out here trying to build a big bridge.
The Hyrule Engineering Club was formed a few days earlier Tears of the KingdomRelease date by AJ Muncill, a pharmacy technician and Twitch streamer. In the days after Tears of the KingdomAfter the release, the community grew exponentially as players noticed Only how flexible the game’s building mechanics were. The Hyrule Engineering Club quickly grew into a place not only to showcase creations but also to encourage collaboration and collective creativity.
“The community itself is great,” Muncill told Polygon. “Each post of a build has a discussion about how to improve it in the comments. It’s so much fun to see people coming together to create bigger and better things. The invention rate is amazing.”
It’s easy to see Tears of the Kingdom or another single player game as a solitary experience, the player huddled together and hunched over a Nintendo Switch. That’s definitely still true for some players, but the creativity and experimentation it took to uncover all the small details of the game almost forced us to start a community; In a game this big, with so many variables, there is no way for a single person to figure it all out on their own. The internet’s big brain has led to discoveries such as a rechargeable battery that uses shock absorbers Only how useful the Zonai Stabilizer is and much more.
“It seems like every day there’s a new revelation like: Oh! When you put these together, this happens! And you will see all these comments from other people: Wow! I bet you could use this to…“Taylor Roland, a retail clerk and inventor of Link’s burning hot rod and a mobile platform, Polygon said. “Over time, you’ll see the different ways people have used just this one trick to create a whole range of vehicles and weapons. I think finding a community around your favorite game can be a really fun and social way to get more out of it.”
Hyrule Engineering Club and other similar communities, like the Zelda Builds build and blueprint repository, based on shared knowledge; Sharing is important. Many of the posts provide detailed instructions on how to build the device in your own version of Hyrule, as well as ideas for improvements or iterations.
Besides, there are plenty of them actually Engineers in these communities became Hyrule engineers, people who grapple with the incredible physics Tears of the Kingdom Making inventions that are helpful, awesome, and downright silly—sometimes all three at the same time. Reddit user Paradox_Guardian, who has asked to be given his online name, is an electrical engineer who credits his background with “creativity” and “persistence” in seeing through problems to the end; It’s a process they’ve used on several of their creations, such as the Hylian rice mower and a fan-powered launcher.
“In breath of the wild, I’ve learned that if you have a specific goal in mind, there’s almost always a way to make it succeed,” said Paradox_Guardian. “Sometimes it doesn’t take the form you first expect, but there’s a solution to almost any problem. I took that mentality into this game and keep that in mind as I experiment.”
They said it took about an hour for the lawn mower to work. You started with the real world counterpart and worked from there. Experimenting with the launcher lasted about three hours. It is a more precise and faster device. The idea for the launcher came about after Paradox_Guardian noticed that several in-game objects “take on a specific orientation” when Link picks them up — on a fan, for example, the back of the fan will always face the camera, they said. Transitioning to this position is quick, but it’s there, and that move can be used to launch Link into the sky, at least in the launchers they’ve built so far.
“I noticed that when you pick up the object (a fan in my case) you get a quick, controlled rotation,” said Paradox_Guardian. “The rest of the trick was all about finding the right positioning and jumping at the right time to make the launch work.”
It’s a lot of work to do, but it’s super satisfying when it’s going well – and when it’s being celebrated by the community. But not everything goes perfectly, and sometimes that’s the fun part. Paradox_Guardian’s advice is don’t give up, even when things keep going wrong. And as for the bugs, enjoy them.
“Don’t be afraid to pop a dubious constructed monstrosity every once in a while,” they added.
