The second person to 100% Tears of the Kingdom has nothing left to do, so he's collecting every rock in Hyrule
Zelda players rock
You might have thought the second person to ever 100% The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom would have run out of things to do in Hyrule by now, but apparently not, since he recently took it upon himself to collect every single unique rock in the game.
Speedrunner and content creator SmallAnt managed to 100% Tears of the Kingdom less than two weeks after it was released, in an effort that took just over 139 hours. However, in a new video on his YouTube channel, he says that one viewer's response to this stuck with him, after they suggested that he'd played the game "too fast" and questioned what was left to do other than collect rocks. However, he took this as a serious challenge, and commenced a journey across Hyrule to pick up one of each type of naturally formed stone (including boulders, Talus hearts, and even cooled lava).
As you'd imagine, doing so wasn't entirely straightforward, as many rocks are only found in specific locations on the map, meaning SmallAnt had to embark on a trek across the whole region to collect everything. What's more, he initially made things far harder for himself by transporting them all manually.
While he could have fused rocks to weapons and carried them around in his inventory, he first decides to construct enormous vehicles out of the rocks themselves, forming some kind of Flintstones-style monstrosity to carry them all. After all, he couldn't just leave them in one place – moving too far away from items despawns them, so all of his efforts would just disappear if he ventured off without them.
This in itself causes some very funny problems – he occasionally has to scale tall cliffs, something which isn't much of an issue for Link on his own, but becomes a massive one when you've got to lug a heavy pile of boulders with you. Sometimes, he's able to get around this by attaching rockets and sending him and his contraption into the sky, although eventually, as the pile becomes too heavy to lift properly, he improvises by using the Recall ability to reverse the vehicle's falling animation, and manually dragging the whole thing using the Ultrahand ability.
Eventually, the journey expands when SmallAnt loads up a huge spreadsheet compiling every object in the game, pointing out several new rocks that needed to be added to his collection. However, some of these were in The Depths, so at this point, he deconstructs his huge vehicle and fuses everything to the items in his inventory for safe keeping while grabbing the rest. In total, there ended up being 44 different rocks, which he unfuses from his inventory to create one enormous pile in Tarrey Town.
A year on from its release, there's still clearly plenty of fun to be had in Tears of the Kingdom. Even if collecting rocks isn't your thing, another genius player recently demonstrated how to make Moblins play basketball, which works way better than you'd expect and is surprisingly easy to do.
Sign up to the 12DOVE Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
I'm one of 12DOVE's news writers, who works alongside the rest of the news team to deliver cool gaming stories that we love. After spending more hours than I can count filling The University of Sheffield's student newspaper with Pokemon and indie game content, and picking up a degree in Journalism Studies, I started my career at GAMINGbible where I worked as a journalist for over a year and a half. I then became TechRadar Gaming's news writer, where I sourced stories and wrote about all sorts of intriguing topics. In my spare time, you're sure to find me on my Nintendo Switch or PS5 playing through story-driven RPGs like Xenoblade Chronicles and Persona 5 Royal, nuzlocking old Pokemon games, or going for a Victory Royale in Fortnite.
This new indie D&D campaign setting brings Studio Ghibli and Zelda: Breath of the Wild aesthetics and worldbuilding to the tabletop RPG, and I'm already scheming hard as a DM
After 3 years, these Legend of Zelda fans have finally finished decompiling the code of Majora's Mask to help modders and speedrunners - but there's "still tons of work to be done"