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Feb 22, 2024

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Fan Makes Surprising Physics Discovery

An inquisitive Tears of the Kingdom fan takes online to share a surprising result of a physics experiment in the latest Zelda game. One inquisitive player has found that the gravity in The Legend of

An inquisitive Tears of the Kingdom fan takes online to share a surprising result of a physics experiment in the latest Zelda game.

One inquisitive player has found that the gravity in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is nearly three times as strong as the gravitational strength of Earth. They subsequently took online to detail their startling Tears of the Kingdom discovery, fueling everything from amazement to wild speculation among the fandom.

While Tears of the Kingdom plays it safe with Switch's hardware, the aging console didn't prevent Nintendo from delivering its most advanced physics engine yet. Between that and the game's powerful building mechanics, many players have been conducting elaborate experiments with the Tears of the Kingdom engine ever since the hit Switch exclusive was released.

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Following one particularly scientific example of such efforts, Reddit user JukedHimOuttaSocks measured that the gravitational acceleration in Hyrule equals 28.2 meters (92.52 feet) per second squared, a figure that dwarfs Earth's own 9.8m/s² gravity by a factor of almost three. The fan arrived at this result by capturing footage of Link falling from 60 meters, then going over each frame of the recording and mapping out the change in the minimap's Z coordinate by hand, similar to how another player recently calculated that their Tears of the Kingdom Link launcher broke the sound barrier.

The author of this surprising experiment acknowledged that the minimap coordinates might not be expressed in meters, but argued against that possibility. Elaborating on their point, the fan explained that standing next to a four-unit beam reveals that Link is 1.75 units tall, which comes out to 5"9 under the assumption that those units are meters. Seeing how that's a reasonable height for a humanoid character, the fan concluded there's little reason to believe that the minimap coordinates aren't expressed in meters.

Though it's extremely unlikely that Nintendo decided on this newly measured gravitational acceleration for any other reason than making Tears of the Kingdom's gameplay as fun as possible, that didn't stop some players from reacting to this discovery with additional speculation. Some hence theorized the planet that Hyrule is located on is either extremely dense or much larger than Earth. Expanding on the latter theory, one fan calculated that the fictional planet's diameter is 2.9 times larger than that of Earth, assuming equivalent density between the two.

While some of the game's systems clearly conform to the known laws of the universe, Tears of the Kingdom is still happy to throw physics out of the window for the sake of gameplay. One of the most obvious examples of that design philosophy is the fact that Tears of the Kingdom players can avoid fall damage from extreme heights by simply diving into water, which, in reality, would likely be a fatal experience due to the violent deceleration experienced by the body upon impact.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available on Nintendo Switch.

MORE: Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a Master Class in Open-World Design

Dominik's been writing about games for as long as he can remember and is sure he began doing so professionally in 2010 or thereabouts. If he was forced to pick a favorite genre, he'd go with RPGs, but he wasn't, so he didn't.