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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom fans are still delving deep into the game's engineering system, and this recent creation looks like both Hestu's worst nightmare and all my personal dreams come true - even if those dreams pertain to a different game.
The Hyrule Engineering subreddit is a place where Tears of the Kingdom fans can show off their most intricate builds and spread their crafting wisdom. In a recent post, one user shared a logging machine capable of both cutting down and transporting tree trunks with surprising efficiency.
[FEB24] This is how Hyrule engineers farm wood from r/HyruleEngineering
It's a slightly destructive technique, thanks in no small part to the ballistic weapon that's used to knock the trees down in a single hit, but once the trunk has started to fall, the process is pretty neat. The machine scoops up the lumber, and then transports it to a nearby repository, keeping the trunk held in place until it's ready to be dropped in a specific spot.
All told, it seems a bit much for Tears of the Kingdom - by the time you can make something like this, you likely don't have a huge need for anything made out of wood. It's fast, but it probably produces more lumber than most players would need in an entire playthrough in just a few minutes. It strikes me, however, that it'd be excellent for survival games - anyone who's ever played a survival game will know how important never-ending bundles of wood can be in those, and one survival game in particular jumps out to me.
During the pandemic, I played a lot of a game called Scrap Mechanic, which combined the sticks-and-stones, hunger-and-thirst gameplay traditional to the survival game genre with a very robust creation system not unlike Tears of the Kingdom's. You could build vehicles to drive you around the world, irrigation machines to help water your crops, or mining and lumber behemoths for resource gathering.
The latter is what I was immediately reminded of with Link's new tree-destroyer. Specifically this post, which saw one intrepid engineer absolutely mince an entire tree in a few seconds flat. Link's effort isn't quite as immediately destructive, but the 'chute-style' hopper into which the trees are collected are pretty similar.
Of course, the Tears of the Kingdom community is hard at work pushing all facets of the game to their limits. In recent weeks, we've reported on players gathering huge numbers of resources and a streamer who tried to beat the entire game without using any of its key items. By contrast, a lumberjack machine might seem a bit small-fry, but I'd still pick it for basically any survival game I've ever played.
Seriously, give me this thing in basically every one of the best survival games on this list.
