Thanks to some tactical tinkering, oneThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomplayer 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 auseful trick for tackling the final boss fight inTears of the Kingdom.
The ability to create custom structures and vehicles has been widely touted as one of the main selling points of the latestZeldagame, not least because it does a great job at building on the sandbox design ofBreath 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 onTears of the Kingdom’sUltrahand 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.
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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 inThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomhave 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 areTears of the Kingdom’sBrightbloom 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 moreTears of the Kingdomitems 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 ofTears of the Kingdomstructures and vehicles is also said to work with Autobuild, and not just contraptions that were manually built using Ultrahand.
Players looking to prevent theirTears of the KingdomKing Gleeok mechsand 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 onTears of the Kingdomcontraptions, 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 Kingdomis out now, exclusively for the Nintendo Switch.
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