I Built Link’s Deadliest Spinning Doom Turret

Back in the summer of ‘23, Hyrule was still buzzing with fresh energy. Tears of the Kingdom had just landed, and I—like millions of other Zelda lunatics—was utterly obsessed. The Zonai devices handed us a brand-new set of LEGO bricks, and we all went absolutely bonkers building anything from simple air bikes to colossal walking war machines. I’ll be honest: my early builds were a hot mess. Poor Link ended up barbecued, electrocuted, or launched into orbit more times than I care to count. But one night, scrolling through the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit, I stumbled on a contraption that made my jaw drop. A fellow named POGO_BOY38 had posted a 22-second clip of what I can only describe as a portable spinning apocalypse. That moment changed my entire approach to enemy camps.

The video showed a squat little tank rolling into a bokoblin fort. Atop it, a Big Wheel spun like a berserk carnival ride, with two flame emitters and two beam lasers strapped to it. An ice emitter was tacked onto the back as a makeshift motor, and the whole thing shimmied toward the monsters on tank treads while a stabilizer kept it from toppling over. Once it got close, utter pandemonium broke loose. Boss bokoblin? Toasted. Regular bokoblins? Vaporized. Link himself took a few licks of fire, but who cares when the screen fills with sparkles of loot? The OP called it a “mobile spinning flame turret,” but I christened it the Doom Carousel. And I knew I had to have my own.

So there I was, in the depths of the Hebra region, scavenging parts. My first attempt was a comedy of errors. I slapped the Big Wheel on crooked, mounted a cannon instead of a flame emitter (bad idea when bokoblins rush you), and forgot the stabilizer entirely. The thing spun out, careened into a wall, and exploded right at Link’s feet. Game over. But hey, failure is the mother of invention, right? POGO_BOY38’s comment section gave me the golden tip: add a second stabilizer. That small tweak made the Doom Carousel ride smoother than a Sheikah slate on a Sunday. I also upgraded the treads to a set I’d pinched from a Hudson construction site, which gave it just enough oomph to mow down foot soldiers before the flames even kicked in.

The real test came when I rolled up to a silver bokoblin encampment near Lurelin Village. I parked Link at a safe distance, hit the Zonai battery, and let the beast loose. The spinning flames created this hypnotic vortex of death—red and orange light reflecting off the wet sand. Enemy health bars melted faster than ice cream in Death Mountain. A couple of keese flew down to investigate and instantly turned into crispy nuggets. The boss bokoblin tried to charge, but the laser emitters auto-targeted its ugly mug, and the flamethrowers did the rest. In under thirty seconds, the entire camp was a smoking crater. I actually stood up from my couch and cheered. That’s the kind of rush you just don’t get from swinging a Master Sword.

Of course, the Doom Carousel isn’t practical against every threat. Lynels? They’d laugh and punt it to the moon. Gleeoks? Forget it. But for clearing out monster bases or just showing off to my buddies on the weekend streaming channel, it’s pure gold. The ice emitter on the back also ended up being a cheeky little detail I’d overlooked—it constantly shoots cold gusts that cool down the machine itself, preventing it from overheating when you’re running it nonstop. Brilliant engineering from POGO_BOY38, even if he said it was just for propulsion.

What floors me, looking back from 2026, is how timeless Tears of the Kingdom’s building sandbox has become. The game is three years old now, yet the community still pumps out mind-blowing inventions. Nintendo never gave us an official DLC, but the player base turned Hyrule into a perpetual R&D lab. People have built fully automated farming rigs, orbital strike platforms, and even a working calculator using electricity and stakes. I still tinker with my Doom Carousel now and then, updating it with the latest weird trick some genius posts online. Just last month, I swapped the flame emitters for hydrants and began using it to hose down volcanic taluses—total overkill, but oh so satisfying.

It’s also nuts to think about the sales milestone that got us here. By late 2023, Tears of the Kingdom had already rocketed to the ninth best-selling Switch title, with over 19.5 million copies shifted. That number’s only climbed since, cementing it as one of the platform’s crown jewels. And every one of those owners, at some point, has probably spent way too many hours fusing random objects together and cackling at the results. I know I have.

So if you’re still roaming the kingdom and feeling a bit bored with the standard combat loop, I’ve got one piece of advice: build yourself a spinning turret of chaos. Tweak the design, make it your own, and let it loose on a monster encampment. Just make sure Link is standing well back—nobody likes getting roasted by their own genius.