Tears of the Kingdom’s Link weighs exactly 10 apples
Have you ever wondered how much Link from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom weighs? Of course not, that would be a silly thing to think about. But one intrepid Hyrule engineer devised a device that would tell them exactly that, and the results are deeply weird.
A post on r/HyruleEngineering, a popular subreddit filled with people making miraculous machines in Tears of the Kingdom, has showcased an accurate working scale. The contraption, made by user RecommendationOk6842, uses a wheel, some mops, and a few other basic materials, along with a Zonai stabilizer, to create a functioning scale that can be used to compare the weights of two objects.
There are some weird discoveries to be made from this contraption. For example, which do you think weighs more: a large rock, or a small rock? Well, the answer is neither, they weigh exactly the same amount. That’s likely due to how the game calculates interactions between objects, since a rock fused to a sword has to work the same no matter how big it was to begin with, for the sake of consistency.
The weirdest part, as the headline gives away, is how much Link weighs. He’s a young man, a little bit shorter than other adults and quite slim, so while he’s not the bulkiest lad, you’d be expecting him to weigh a pretty decent amount. Maybe the weight of a large rock? But nope, Link weighs exactly 10 apples worth of weight. That seems… wrong.
We did some research on apples, and the average apple weighs up to 250g, or about half a pound. Using that metric, Link, at most, would weigh 2.5kg, or roughly 5lb. That’s way too little, and there’s definitely shields and swords that weigh significantly more than that.
So let’s look at the extremes. According to Guinness World Records, a dicey but easy-to-find source, the world’s largest apple was recorded in Japan, grown by Chisato Iawsaki. It weighed 1.849kg, or a teensy bit over 4lb. Expand that out to our 10-apple weight, and we’ve got a weight of 18.49kg, or 40lb, which… is better. Not great, but better.
There are a couple of other factors to take into account, though. We don’t know much about Hylian anatomy, as far as we know their bones could be hollow and their stomachs full of helium. Hyrule’s apples are another unknown — they could be remarkably dense, for all we know, since their life-restoring qualities suggest they are densely packed with nutrients.
Either way, we may never know for sure why Link weighs 10 apples. What we do know, however, is that Hello Kitty officially weighs 3 apples according to Sanrio, and that gives us a much more interesting weight comparison: Link, in Tears of the Kingdom, weighs exactly 3.33 Hello Kitties.
