Tears of the Kingdom Fans Trap Ganondorf in a Never-Ending Hamster Wheel

A ring of eight wheeled Zonai carts now keeps Ganondorf, the recurring Zelda villain and final boss of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, spinning helplessly in place mid fight. Kotaku, the gaming news outlet, spotted the clip on Reddit this week and admitted its own writer could not explain how the thing actually works.

The build is circulating out of HyruleEngineering, a Reddit forum where players post physics contraptions made from the game’s Ultrahand and Fuse tools. Three years after release, a game most people finished long ago is still producing machines strange enough to stump the outlets that cover it for a living.

How Does the Ganondorf Wheel Actually Work?

The short answer: nobody fully knows. The visible parts are simple enough to describe. It is a loop of wheeled Zonai carts bolted together in a circle, with a floating hover stone sitting at the center like an axle. What nobody outside the creator can explain is how that center piece actually drives the outer ring, or how Ganondorf ended up locked inside it mid battle in the first place.

Kotaku’s writer, describing the clip, put it plainly.

I’m baffled as to how it actually works, though.

That admission came from someone who has covered Tears of the Kingdom’s build community since launch. The a ring of eight wheeled Zonai carts shows Ganondorf pacing forever in place while Link stands off to the side doing a small victory dance, timed to hit right as the fight enters the phase where Ganondorf’s health bar stretches across the whole screen.

• What we know – the frame is eight wheeled Zonai carts circling a floating hover stone, and the trap only closes once Ganondorf reaches the extended-health-bar phase of the fight.
• What’s unconfirmed – how the outer ring mechanically links to the hover stone at the center, and how the creator got Ganondorf boxed in there mid fight without him breaking free.

No one in the replies has cracked it either. The post has turned into its own small mystery inside a subreddit built entirely on people showing their work.

A Builder With a Reputation for Glitches

A look through the creator’s post history points to a pattern. They favor builds that lean on glitch exploitation rather than pure Ultrahand assembly, and they have a separate, unrelated habit of building airplanes, which has nothing to do with boss traps but shows up often enough in their feed to be a running theme.

Glitch-hunting has its own history on this game’s subreddits. Back in the summer after launch, a player named Littleawkward1 found a Zonai dispenser that never stopped producing capsules, a bug that let players farm unlimited building materials until the game crashed or the save reloaded. That single discovery fed a wave of copycat exploits, and it is the same lineage the hamster wheel likely draws from.

Whether this particular build used one of those tricks or just very patient trial and error is not something the post answers. The creator has not shown up in the comments to explain it, and three days in, nobody else has either.

The Sandbox Nobody Has Outgrown

Tears of the Kingdom shipped in May 2023 and moved 10 million copies in its first three days on shelves, making it Nintendo’s fastest-selling Zelda release. What is less obvious from that number is how long the building scene kept going after the initial sales rush faded.

Sharing a build has become its own small ritual. Creators post a QR code alongside a finished machine, and anyone can pull it straight into their own save file.

1. Find the specific QR code the creator posts alongside the build.
2. Scan it through the Nintendo Switch’s compatible camera interface.
3. Spawn the finished vehicle directly into the game world using saved blueprints.

That system is how a creator known as sumoguri2323 got a working, a fully functional realm-wide train service in front of players this past spring, three years into the game’s life and still drawing fresh coverage. A hamster wheel with a trapped final boss fits the same pattern: not a one-off joke, but the latest entry in a build scene that has never really slowed down.

From Cucco Grills to a Ganondorf Cage

Boss traps and torture devices go back to the game’s first weeks. Reddit user mellowmars540 built a conveyor belt built to farm Cucco eggs, damaging the birds just enough on a loop to force constant egg production. Other early builders caged the giant Bokoblin boss in a steel-and-wheel enclosure of their own design. The instinct to trap something in a machine is old news in this community. What changes is the ambition.

Each entry on that list solved a different problem with the same toolkit. That is the part Nintendo built into the game on purpose, and the part that keeps paying off years after the fact.

Nintendo Keeps Patching Bugs, Not the Sandbox Itself

Nintendo has not let the exploits run completely wild. Update 1.1.2 shut down the early menu-sorting duplication tricks, and version 1.2.0 closed the methods that survived that first patch. Within weeks, players found a new dispenser-and-ledge glitch that worked under the newer version, and more turned up after that.

The pattern repeated for years. Later updates, including quality-of-life patches through 2025 and into early 2026, focused on bug fixes and Switch 2 support rather than closing off the building system itself. Nintendo has shown no interest in stripping out the freedom that makes builds like the Ganondorf wheel possible in the first place, even as it quietly closes the exploits that get too disruptive.

That balance is why a subreddit built on breaking the game’s physics is still active three years on. Patch the dupes, leave the sandbox.

A 424-Page Book Bets on the Same Obsession

Nintendo is leaning into the same fascination that produced the hamster wheel. A companion volume titled The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Secrets of the Zonai is due out in October, running 424 pages and built around the Zonai civilization whose leftover technology fuels every cart, wheel, and hover stone players use to build.

The book arrives during the Zelda franchise’s 40th anniversary year, a milestone Nintendo has otherwise marked with reissues and remasters rather than a new mainline entry. Betting a full art book on a 424-page hardcover exploring Zonai lore only makes sense if Nintendo expects fans are still deep enough in this game’s mechanics to care, and builds like this month’s boss trap suggest that bet is a safe one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the HyruleEngineering subreddit?

HyruleEngineering is a Reddit community built specifically around Ultrahand and Zonai contraptions in Tears of the Kingdom, separate from the game’s general discussion forums. Members post finished builds, often with QR codes attached so others can load the same machine into their own save.

What are Zonai devices, exactly?

Zonai devices are the wheels, fans, hover stones, and other parts players fuse together with Ultrahand, restocked at dispensers scattered around Hyrule. They are tied to the Zonai, an ancient in-game civilization whose ruins, symbols, and leftover technology shape most of the game’s visual world.

Has Nintendo patched the trick behind this specific build?

There is no confirmation of that yet. Past exploits, like the 2023 dispenser glitch, took Nintendo several weeks to address in an update. This build only surfaced this month, so any response would likely still be pending.

Is this the first time players have trapped a boss in a machine?

No. Early in the game’s life, builders caged the giant Bokoblin boss using a steel enclosure built from wheels and scrap metal, well before anyone thought to try it on Ganondorf.

When might the next mainline Zelda game arrive?

Nintendo has not announced one. Breath of the Wild released in 2017 and Tears of the Kingdom followed six years later in 2023. If that gap repeats, the next mainline entry would not be expected before 2029.