Highlights
- Tears of the Kingdom players have been building impressive aircraft using the game's flexible building mechanics, including a plane that can reach speeds of over 200 miles per hour.
- The player used a combination of the lightest known component and a free-floating fan to achieve this incredible speed.
- While the glitched Steering Stick allowed the player to control the plane, a recent game update fixed the glitch, making it impossible to recreate this design in the current version of the game.
One clever The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player managed to build an incredible plane whose top speed surpasses 200 miles per hour. Their invention adds to the growing list of Tears of the Kingdom fighter jets, helicopters, and other impressive aircraft that the fandom has pioneered to date.
Given the massive size of Tears of the Kingdom's map and the game's flexible building mechanics, it's no surprise that plenty of fans have been practicing their engineering skills on various airplane designs since the latest entry in the franchise hit the store shelves on May 12. After all, flying is an extremely effective way of moving around Hyrule, and building components in the game are nothing if not abundant.
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Nevertheless, few fans have so far found as much success in taking to the skies as Reddit user chesepuf, who recently put together a funny-looking but seriously impressive aircraft that's clearly much faster than Nintendo intended in-game vehicles to be. The tail end of their plane consists of the guard rail found in the Construct Factory, which is the lightest known component in Tears of the Kingdom that's barely bothered by gravity. But the much more important component is the unattached fan that's trapped inside the front-loaded slates. Namely, free-floating Zonai devices in the game don't experience Newton's third law, so confining a working fan allows it to push its surroundings while also carrying itself.
This setup allowed the player to reach a speed of 90 meters per second, or over 201 miles per hour. The figure was calculated using the rate of change in the mini-map coordinates observed in the newly shared footage of the plane in action. And while hitting around half that speed normally knocks Link off the controls, the player managed to side-step this effect by using a glitched Steering Stick that's immune to it.
However, since the bugged device can no longer actually control vehicles, the crafty inventor also attached another Steering Stick to the front of the plane in order to make it remotely pilotable, as well as a second rear-mounted fan to help with maneuvering. Nintendo fixed the so-called "ultrabroken stick" glitch with the Tears of the Kingdom update 1.2.0 back in July, so players using an up-to-date version of the game won't be able to recreate this design.
This curious creation is not the first clever aircraft that the Zelda fandom pioneered since the turn of the month. That title goes to the ridiculous NPC-powered flyer that another Tears of the Kingdom player built during the first weekend of October.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available now on Nintendo Switch.