Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Fan Builds Fighter Jet

Summary

Tears of the Kingdom players have been creating incredible inventions, including a functional fighter jet with a missile and afterburner.
Aircraft, like the fighter jet, are useful in Tears of the Kingdom as they make traversal easier and some players have spent months perfecting their designs.
The fighter jet's ability to manually activate the missile and afterburner, as well as its accuracy in hitting targets, makes it one of the most impressive planes created in the game.

One The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player put together a functional fighter jet featuring a missile and an afterburner, both of which can be deployed at will. Their creation is yet another addition to the vast pool of incredible inventions that Tears of the Kingdom players have been building since the Switch exclusive released in mid-May.

Planes and other aircraft are some of the most useful types of vehicles that can be created with Tears of the Kingdom's Ultrahand ability, largely because flying trivializes traversal, the game's most consistent challenge. Many players have hence already spent months perfecting their aircraft designs, whether in order to nail a particular aesthetic or optimize them for combat.

And though the fighter jet that was recently built by Reddit user Wise_Mulberry1065 doesn't exactly fall into either of those categories, it's actually one of the most impressive Tears of the Kingdom planes that has surfaced online to date. That's in no small part thanks to its ability to fire a Zonai Rocket and utilize another such missile as an afterburner, with both of those features being activated manually. Triggering the thrust mechanism is as simple as letting go of the controls mid-flight for about a second or so, with the ensuing loss in power prompting the central wheel-mounted Zonai Stabilizer to turn to its side, clearing the line of fire for the Pulse Emitter in the back to hit the rocket in the front once Link resumes piloting the plane.

The aircraft's weaponry uses a similar mechanism with a Zonai Stabilizer mounted on a wheel, but angled in such a manner that tilting the plane downward causes the attached Beam Emitter to fire the missile. A video demonstration of this impressive fighter jet that its creator shared on Reddit suggests that the plane's launch mechanism is consistent enough to swiftly and reliably hit larger targets such as enemy encampments. That's an incredibly impressive accomplishment for a vehicle that's convoluted to the point of a Rube Goldberg machine, as anyone who tries to follow Wise_Mulberry1065's intricate step-by-step guide for recreating their Tears of the Kingdom fighter jet will find out.

This engineering feat testifies to the fact that the game's building meta continues to evolve even four months into its release. And while some fans were previously hoping for even more building options in the form of post-launch content, a senior Nintendo official recently revealed that there are currently no plans for Tears of the Kingdom DLC.