Over the course of the past two months, multiple Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom players have shared ideas to create a submarine that lets you explore the game's underwater areas from a first-person perspective, and they've finally got an impressive working model.
That's quite a feat considering that Tears of the Kingdom doesn't let you go underwater or play in first-person, but a player who goes by smaho_neko figured out a way to change that. As Automaton West notes, smaho_neko previously discovered a Breath of the Wild exploit that allowed you to look underwater in first-person by trapping Link under a cryonis block, but that technique wouldn't work in Tears of the Kingdom.
So, smaho-neko started trying to find an alternative method with an Ultrahand build. Initially, that process resulted in several machines that could succinctly be described as Link torture devices, repeatedly dunking the hero underwater at extreme velocities like an overactive Ferris wheel. Eventually, the design turned into a small box consisting of a square board, two small rectangular boards, a wooden pillar, and a Zonai floating stone.
You can see a demonstration of this 'Hydroscope' build in the video above, but basically it serves as an underwater observation box, letting you take a close look at the aquatic locations that are normally inaccessible to Link. A few weeks later, smaho_neko followed up with an improved design that uses a Zonai stake to keep the Hydroscope rooted in place.
ゾナウ力潜水艦ノーチラス号ついに水中にカメラを入れた状態で移動可能になりました！#ゼルダの伝説 #TearsOfTheKingdom #Zelda #ティアキン pic.twitter.com/ILtDkQ6GXHJuly 23, 2023
But it was another player, sumoguri2323, who brought the design to its apparent final form. Inspired by the Hydroscope design, sumoguri2323 made it part of a watercraft, giving Link a submarine to explore underwater with. It's essentially a marginally-less-terrifying version of Subnautica at this point.
Now that we're a few months out from Tears of the Kingdom's launch, the community creations are starting to get truly wild, ranging from a tribute to the weirdest sidequest in Majora's Mask to an increasingly humiliating series of traps for Ganon.
I'm nearly longing for the simpler days of Korok torture.
