Since the game’s debut in May, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has seen players craft some incredibly clever and complex machinery. The latest example, though, seems to push the game’s crafting capabilities to a whole new level with the creation of what we think is Hyrule’s first-remote control aeroplane.
The contraption was shared by a member of Reddit’s Hyrule Engineering Club, which is a fantastic resource of machines and building techniques for aspiring Tears of the Kingdom inventors. But unlike rolling death machines armed with cannons and flame emitters designed to make short work of Bokoblin encampments, Reddit user miohonda has created an entirely new class of vehicle for the game that many of us assumed would be impossible without an official gameplay update from Nintendo adding new capabilities.
Although miohonda hasn’t shared step-by-step building instructions, in a later comment, they do explain the basics of how their remote control aeroplane actually works. The contraption takes advantage of the in-game ability to send electric power from shrine batteries to shields fuse-entangled with shock emitters at any distance.
Many engineers might know that fuse entangled shock emitters will electrify the shield no matter the distance.
But what about shrine batteries? Turns out they do the same thing, but only in water.
I attached entangled shields to the motors to serve as electric recievers, when the corresponding battery touches water, it will activate and create thrust.
So the RC plane is actually two separate machines that work together. The remote control is a platform with a steering stick that can raise and lower two separate shrine batteries into a small lake to activate them one at a time, and a plane with with motors and custom-built propellers that are individually powered by those batteries from afar. It’s not necessarily the easiest plane to fly, or the most agile, as steering is handled by powering only one of its two propellers at a time, but what’s remarkable is that this approach appears to actually work. Most all other aircraft in the game require Link to pilot them by standing on them.
Can you use the RC plane to attack enemies from afar while keeping Link a safe distance away? That remains to be seen, but given how quickly Tears of the Kingdom builds have advanced in just a month’s time, we would not be surprised to see someone figure that out in the coming weeks.