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Jun 13, 2023

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Player Improves Classic Hoverbike Design

One Tears of the Kingdom player leverages a recent engineering discovery in order to build the game's most impressive hoverbike yet. One crafty The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player managed

One Tears of the Kingdom player leverages a recent engineering discovery in order to build the game's most impressive hoverbike yet.

One crafty The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player managed to improve on the classic hoverbike design by leveraging the latest milestone in the game's fast-developing building meta. They promptly took online to share their discovery, having done so just as Nintendo released the 1.2.0 update for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

While the game's fandom has so far authored a wide variety of impressive Tears of the Kingdom flying machines, virtually no aircraft design can beat the barebone hoverbike in terms of simplicity, energy-efficiency, and range. Attaching two slightly downward angled fans to a Zonai Steering Stick has hence been the easiest way to create a reliable all-terrain vehicle ever since the game hit the store shelves on May 12.

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Reddit user Bored-Fish00 has now managed to improve on this classic Tears of the Kingdom air bike build with the addition of a guard rail, a rare component found in only a single location in the entire game. Thanks to its uniquely floaty physics stemming from its minimal weight, using the guard rail to connect the Zonai Steering Stick with a pair of fans yields a hoverbike that's even more maneuverable than its original iteration. A newly viral video showcasing this design in action saw its author demonstrate some incredibly smooth flying around the Construction Site Well to the west of Tarrey Town.

Anyone interested in experimenting with this idea can procure a guard rail by visiting Tears of the Kingdom's Construct Factory, which only becomes fully accessible once the player beats the game's first four temples and continues progressing the main quest for a few more hours. The component is part of the fan-powered elevators that feature extensively throughout the Construct Factory and can be detached with a single perpendicularly angled rocket.

And while reaching its location will likely require dozens of hours of playing time, the good news is that saving the guard rail with the Autobuild ability is enough to have it permanently available in one's inventory at the cost of a few Zonaite pieces. For context, a typical part spawned with Autobuild will disappear once detached from its original construction, but the guard rail appears to be immune to that limitation, which makes it an extremely convenient and surprisingly reusable building component.

Additionally, this secret ingredient doesn't conduce electricity, cannot burn, and won't be destroyed if hit with a weapon, as revealed by some extensive player testing that's been going on since its discovery. Given those unique properties, this improved hoverbike design likely won't be the last major development in the Tears of the Kingdom building meta stemming from the discovery of the guard rail.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available on Nintendo Switch.

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Dominik's been writing about games for as long as he can remember and is sure he began doing so professionally in 2010 or thereabouts. If he was forced to pick a favorite genre, he'd go with RPGs, but he wasn't, so he didn't.