One incredibly crafty The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player managed to turn a fairly hard-hitting enemy into a harmless rain sensor as part of a convoluted contraption that underlines the game's immense potential for creating Rube Goldberg machines. They subsequently went online to share their impressive achievement, having done so shortly after another player discovered a Tears of the Kingdom trick for massively increasing vehicle despawn distance.
While the new Zelda game is cut from the same design cloth as Breath of the Wild, it iterates on its predecessor's formula in some major ways. One of Nintendo's most impactful additions is Tears of the Kingdom's Ultrahand, which allows the player to create buildings and vehicles by joining any movable objects that they encounter in the overworld or find in their inventory.
While many fans have been pushing this ability to its limits ever since the game's debut, few have done so as successfully as Reddit user Penguin_Poacher, who managed to build a rain sensor powered by an Electric Lizalfos, one of Tears of the Kingdom's most dangerous non-boss enemies. This was done in service of a contraption for automating the process of skipping bad weather by a campfire in an impressively overengineered manner. The creation relies on a trapped Electric Lizalfos to power a mechanism that raises a roof and starts a campfire underneath it as soon as the first drops of rain boost the creature's attack and make it emit electricity in the process.
A post demonstrating this Tears of the Kingdom device in action went viral on Reddit within hours, with many fans standing in awe at the complexity of this achievement, not least because the design could have just as well worked with a static roof. While its author hasn't shared an in-depth explanation of how they made the flashier retractable roof, such functionality could feasibly be accomplished by placing a wheel-connected platform on a Zonai Spring. A similar setup leveraging two wooden beams joined by a wheel was seemingly used for the arm that starts the campfire, while the actual spark came from a single piece of Fire Fruit placed next to a flint and some wood.
Much like the massive mechs that Tears of the Kingdom players have been showing off in recent weeks, this contraption is yet another example highlighting the incredible sandbox potential of the new Zelda game. Additionally, it also serves as a proof-of-concept for building Zonai machinery that doesn't deplete Link's Energy Cell reserves, at least so long as it's raining.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available now on Nintendo Switch.