Thanks to some tactical tinkering, one The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player discovered a trick that dramatically increases vehicle despawn distance. They promptly took online to document their discovery, having done so shortly before another fan found a useful trick for tackling the final boss fight in Tears of the Kingdom.
The ability to create custom structures and vehicles has been widely touted as one of the main selling points of the latest Zelda game, not least because it does a great job at building on the sandbox design of Breath of the Wild. However, getting such a feature to work smoothly on the Switch's modest hardware was no easy feat, and required Nintendo to impose a number of limitations on Tears of the Kingdom's Ultrahand ability. One of them came in the form of a component cap, as any structure with more than 21 individual pieces will start falling apart once players attempt adding to it.
Another such limitation is the game's tendency to despawn all structures as soon as the player starts moving away from them. However, as recently discovered by YouTuber Kleric, the actual despawn radius varies greatly between items. This can be used to the player's advantage because all custom-built structures inherit this boundary from their "stickiest" component. Namely, even though most objects disappear by the time Link finds himself around 200 meters (~656 feet) away from them, dragon parts in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom have a despawn radius of a whopping 2,000 meters.
This anomaly allows players to dramatically increase the despawn distance of any structure or vehicle by simply sticking a dragon horn, fang, or scale to their contraptions. The second-stickiest class of in-game items are Tears of the Kingdom's Brightbloom seeds; both big and small variants of this plant reportedly have a despawn distance of approximately 610 meters, so they are a good alternative to dragon parts, given their overall abundance.
Kleric's testing suggests no more Tears of the Kingdom items come close to significantly affecting the despawn distance of vehicles and buildings, with mirrors being the only other objects that despawn at (just) over 200 meters. This trick for extending the disappearance radius of Tears of the Kingdom structures and vehicles is also said to work with Autobuild, and not just contraptions that were manually built using Ultrahand.
Players looking to prevent their Tears of the Kingdom King Gleeok mechs and other aircraft from disappearing mid-flight should bear in mind that this method will not affect that mechanic. Namely, the said phenomenon stems from yet another limitation on Tears of the Kingdom contraptions, as Nintendo placed a 60-second usage timer on some components such as Zonai Wings, which are capable of gliding without a power source. And while the aforementioned restrictions likely exist for performance reasons, it's plausible that this particular limit was merely meant to prevent players from staying airborne indefinitely.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is out now, exclusively for the Nintendo Switch.