One clever The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player discovered an easy way to create vehicles that defy the game's normal gravity. They promptly took to social media to share their discovery, having done so just as the fandom started suspecting that Tears of the Kingdom is lying about weapon damage.
Link's new powers in the latest Zelda game include Ultrahand, an ability that lets players create complex structures and vehicles by sticking together any non-equipable objects that they encounter during their adventures. Since the game's May 12 release, the internet has been overwhelmed with clips of amazing Tears of the Kingdom machines like Batmobiles, helicopters, and catapults, all built using Ultrahand.
And while many such creations allow Link to take to the skies through some impressively complex engineering, it turns out that one fairly effective way to prolong air time in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom barely requires any resources. As discovered by Reddit user TaserBot, horizontally attaching two opposite-facing Zonai Stabilizers to a platform creates a low-gravity effect on the resulting object, significantly slowing down its descent. They demonstrated this find with a brief video clip that shows them using a pair of stabilizers to effectively turn a Zonai Cart into a weightier glider.
The utility value of this curious interaction is somewhat dubious, not least because stabilizers are some of the heaviest devices in Tears of the Kingdom. In other words, bringing two of them airborne borders on impossible, at least if the goal is to build an aircraft. A handful of fans arranged in a hovercraft-like system might do the trick, but at the expense of creating another major issue that is power consumption; all Zonai Devices in Tears of the Kingdom have individual power requirements, so fueling half a dozen of them for any substantial period of time is something that's only feasible fairly late in the game.
Nevertheless, this discovery has the potential to inform future designs of Tears of the Kingdom machinery like walking mechs and even conventional land vehicles, all of which could benefit from a landing-softening mechanism. As for how the effect actually works, Reddit user mengico speculated that opposite-facing stabilizers don't actually affect the hard-coded gravitational pull, but negate an object's acceleration due to gravity. If that theory is accurate, then this interaction is not a bug, but merely an example of Tears of the Kingdom's physics system working exactly as intended.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available now on Switch.