One The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player pushed the limits of the game's building mechanics by putting together a working combustion engine. They subsequently took to social media to share this feat of engineering, having done so shortly after another Tears of the Kingdom fan showcased an incredible three-floor house design.
True to its sandbox design philosophy, the latest Zelda game doesn't force players to build anything but the simplest contraptions in order to overcome its many challenges. However, those who do choose to engage with Tears of the Kingdom's Ultrahand ability beyond the required minimum will eventually find it to have incredible potential for both utility and tomfoolery alike.
This newly emerged example of a working combustion engine definitely falls in the latter category, but that doesn't necessarily make it less impressive than Tears of the Kingdom King Gleeok mechs and other imposing machinery that the fandom has been building in recent weeks. Created by Reddit user jtrofe, the contraption uses two Zonai Canons for pushing a moving piston by simply firing into its equivalent of a fixed cylinder mounted on a Zonai Spring. The plunger, in turn, rotates a makeshift crankshaft, as seen in a brief video demonstration of the machine which the author shared on June 22.
While many Tears of the Kingdom fans reacting to this feat of engineering conveyed their astonishment at the achievement, a few others were reluctant to label it as an actual external combustion engine, arguing that the contraption is more of a kinetic force converter. Not everyone shared in that hesitancy, with Reddit user senorali positing that real combustion engine cylinders could very well be considered compact canons.
Semantics aside, it's dubious whether this creation could have a material impact on the game's building meta; the current design already uses a double-digit number of components just to get the crankshaft turning, which inhibits its practical applications because Tears of the Kingdom limits players to 21 parts per a single structure before the build starts falling apart. While this was likely done for performance reasons, it's still a hard cap on the degree of complexity that players can hope to engineer, which is not much greater than the convolutedness of this makeshift combustion engine.
Nevertheless, the building meta surrounding the new Zelda game continues to evolve at a steady pace. One of its latest milestones occurred just a few weeks ago, when a crafty Tears of the Kingdom player turned an enemy into a rain sensor, thus proving that Zonai devices can be powered without single-use batteries and Link's energy cell reserves.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available on Nintendo Switch.