Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Player Builds Unusual ‘Dragon’ Machine

Highlights

• Reddit user CynicMusic built a wacky mechanical dragon in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
• Their contraption uses a triple pendulum to mimic a dragon’s locomotion animation in an exaggerated and chaotic manner.
• The device is next to impossible to control, but highly amusing to witness.

One highly inventive player has gone through the effort of building a wacky mechanical beast meant to mimic a dragon in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. An entertaining video showcasing their creation recently made the rounds on social media as yet another example of the incredible level of freedom that the Tears of the Kingdom building mechanics offer to players.

Much like Breath of the Wild, its sequel features several dragons that can be found circling various portions of Hyrule. There is a total of four dragons to be found in Tears of the Kingdom, and while each of them drops unique crafting materials and dons distinct colors, they all share the same flying animation that shows them gliding through the air while bending their serpentiform bodies like some kind of flying eels.

In an effort to recreate these majestic creatures, Reddit user CynicMusic recently put together a wacky contraption using the Tears of the Kingdom Ultrahand ability. And while the end result of their design effort might not look like one of the game’s dragons while stationary, it’s easy to see what its creator was going for once the machine takes to the skies. Namely, this convoluted device mimics a dragon’s locomotion animation in an exaggerated manner thanks to a triple pendulum consisting of wood beams connected via cartwheels.

The mechanical dragon’s head equivalent comprises a Zonai Wing with three Zonai Fans, which function as the machine’s main propulsion system. There’s another fan mounted at the top of the triple pendulum that consistently keeps the vehicle’s “neck” upright, while indirectly causing its dragon body equivalent to move in a more erratic manner. The resulting movement is “totally chaotic,” as CynicMusic put it, but highly amusing to witness.

The Tears of the Kingdom player explained that the stabilizer mounted at the end of the vehicle next to its Zonai Steering Stick offered a greater stalling effect than expected, which prompted them to practice controlling the contraption. That notwithstanding, CynicMusic eventually concluded that “you can’t really pilot a chaos vehicle” of this sort, much like their recently shared video demonstration of the machine illustrates.

To my surprise, the stabilizer stalled the wing less than expected, so I practiced controlling it. You can’t really pilot a chaos vehicle but I tried.

This isn’t the first attempt at creating a mechanical dragon that the Zelda fandom has authored to date. Another Tears of the Kingdom player recently built a flying dragon machine that’s much easier to pilot than CynicMusic’s contraption, although its increased maneuverability comes at the cost of a less majestic—and hilarious—flying animation.