Breath of the Wild's Hyrule digital diorama
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Two weeks ago I posted a Zelda timeline here ahead of the Ocarina of Time remake. Here's what I've been working on: Breath of the Wild's Hyrule as a small 3D diorama you can explore. It has the main landmarks and a few easter eggs. It was the last Zelda game I played, early in the pandemic on a Wii U. It's been a fun little hit of nostalgia revisiting those places.The terrain information comes from data the Zelda modding community which was then smoothed and scaled down. It's Three.js with the lighting and shadows baked when the page loads.I built it with Claude, as I did the timeline. Without it, I'd never have had the time for a project this whimsical, so it wouldn't have seen the light of day. I didn't write any of the code. For me it felt a lot like part of being a tech lead: shaping the ideas and the output.
HN · launched Nov 1, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 86%) · 0 views
Niche: interactive 3d web simulations · 157 launches, 14 in the last 7 days ▼ -13% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Content generation
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 157 launches in interactive 3d web simulations →
Could you build this?
Partial The 3D viewer, lighting, and guided tour are standard Three.js work, but the terrain data has to be extracted from the game's files, which is a niche reverse-engineering step.
What it would actually take: Use a Three.js or WebGL viewer over a heightmap-based mesh, with markers and day/night or weather shaders added on top. The hard part is getting accurate height and landmark data out of the game's map files, which requires reverse-engineering the asset format or using community-extracted data. Hand-painted styling and asset work are also needed, but they do not require specialist engineering.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 253 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #221 of 254 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 366 days after the earliest competitor.
- The Zelda timeline to catch up before the Ocarina of Time remake · hn · 2026-10-18 · 226 upvotes · similarity 0.76
- oot-remake-modding · github · 2026-11-09 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- The-Legend-of-Zelda-Ocarina-of-Time-Remake-AllinOne- · github · 2026-11-07 · 32 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- totk-progress · github · 2026-11-09 · 53 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- echora · github · 2026-11-06 · 32 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- BOTWRecompAndroid · github · 2026-10-24 · 296 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Ocarina Guide Map AI · ph · 2026-11-08 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- oot-pc-recomp · github · 2026-11-05 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.49
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