One The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player was forced to re-evaluate their engineering skills after experiencing spectacular trebuchet failure. They subsequently took to social media to share their entertaining mishap, which gained online traction shortly after another viral Tears of the Kingdom clip demonstrated the importance of fire safety.
Much like its immediate predecessor, the new Zelda game is designed around emergent gameplay, which it accomplishes through a combination of an open-world map and a wide variety of mechanics conducive to creativity. One such system revolves around Tears of the Kingdom's Ultrahand, a successor to Breath of the Wild's Magnesis rune that not only works on non-metallic materials this time around, but also lets Link fuse together objects in order to create vehicles, traps, and buildings.
And while many players were thrilled to learn that this newfound power can be used for creating complex machinery like devastating Tears of the Kingdom attack drones and bipedal mechs, others have found that they can have a blast with much simpler designs, sometimes quite literally. This was recently exemplified by Reddit user DrDalmaijer, who shared a gameplay clip of an ill-configured trebuchet intended to launch some Time Bombs. Unfortunately for them, the design failed in quite a spectacular fashion, and the only thing that ended up being propelled in the ensuing explosion was its control platform, awkwardly standing Link included.
Elaborating on this humorous mishap that somehow left Link unscathed, DrDalmaijer wrote that they were surprised to see their Tears of the Kingdom contraption explode in such an immediate fashion, revealing that they actually had the foresight to place its Bomb Flowers in a basket made of wagon wheels. Since the propellant wasn't actually attached to the machine, it should not have received a signal once the trebuchet was powered on.
That notwithstanding, the placement of the Bomb Flowers might have played a part in this accident, with another possibility being that the basket was simply too heavy, generating enough force to cause the Time Bombs to bounce—and thus explode—first. DrDalmaijer labeled the latter scenario as a likely explanation, stating that they'll try rebuilding the trebuchet with only a single bomb and see if that stops the entire payload from exploding.
This is far from the only humorous engineering calamity that's been making the rounds online since the new Zelda game hit the store shelves on May 12. Just last week, one Tears of the Kingdom player regretted skimping on airplane parts after finding themselves in a similar pickle.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available now on Switch.