Tears of the Kingdom Autobuild Guide: Schema Stones and Yiga Schematics
Where Autobuild comes from, where all 12 Schema Stones and 34 Yiga Schematics hide, how zonaite covers missing parts, and how favorites work.
Autobuild is the ability that quietly changes how all of Tears of the Kingdom plays after you find it. Ultrahand, Fuse, Ascend, and Recall all come from the Great Sky Island in your first hour or two. Autobuild sits at the bottom of the world, and a lot of players go ten or twenty hours without it. Once it's yours, the game starts remembering everything you build, and it'll rebuild any of it on command out of nearby junk or raw ore. So here's the deal on getting it, and on stuffing it full of ready-made blueprints.
Unlocking Autobuild
You'll pick this one up at the Great Abandoned Central Mine, in the Central Hyrule Depths pretty much straight down from the Temple of Time on the Great Plateau. The map coordinates land around -0781, -1886, -0523. Nothing gates it, oddly. You can walk down there almost right after reaching the surface, and speedrunners do exactly that. The only real requirement is surviving the walk, because the Depths are dark, gloom-soaked, and full of things that eat unprepared travelers.
The statue route (or the shortcut)
The story way in is a main quest called A Mystery in the Depths. Finish Camera Work in the Depths for Robbie first, then keep checking in with Josha at Lookout Landing. If her new quest won't open, go clear one of the Regional Phenomena temples and come back. The quest sends you down a chasm south of Lookout Landing, where a trail of big statues with one raised arm points you along tunnel after tunnel. Follow the arms. They drag you past a Frox (sneak around it or fight it, your call) and end right at the mine.
Don't feel like waiting on quest flags? Drop through a chasm on the plateau side and pick your way over. There's even a minecart track covering part of that approach. Either way, pack brightbloom seeds. The statue route is honestly pretty tame, but everything down there is pitch black until you light it, and gloom will chew through your hearts if you're careless.
The Kohga speed bump
Inside the mine, climb the ruins to the glowing green pedestal and talk to the Steward Construct beside it. Autobuild is yours on the spot. Next, two broken vehicles on pedestals need fixing, one by hand with Ultrahand and one through your new history list. It's a two-minute tutorial and it teaches the entire ability.
The "researchers" watching the demo are Yiga in disguise, because of course they are. Master Kohga drops in for a boss fight immediately after. He putters around a small arena in cobbled-together vehicles. An arrow to the head knocks him off his ride, and that's your window to run in and swing. Bomb flower arrows speed things up a lot. He cycles through a few rigs, you repeat the stun-and-smack routine, done.
Winning pays out a Huge Crystallized Charge, which is a solid chunk of battery progress, and the construct hands you the Fanplane blueprint once the dust settles. Kohga then bolts for the mines in the southwest, which kicks off his own chase-me side quest. You can chase him later. You've got a new toy to play with, and a whole list of blueprints to go fill.
Finding Schema Stones
Schema Stones are the "official" blueprints. There are 12 in the whole game, and most of them sit with Steward Constructs at the abandoned mines scattered across the Depths. Walk up, press A, and the design lands in your Autobuild menu permanently.
One catch worth knowing: those constructs won't hand anything over until you already have Autobuild. Show up early and the robot politely tells you to come back after visiting the Great Abandoned Central Mine. So if you passed a mine on your way in, that's not a wasted trip, it's a to-do list.
All 12 stones
| Blueprint | Where to get it | Notes | |---|---|---| | Fanplane | Great Abandoned Central Mine, Central Hyrule Depths | From the construct after your first Kohga win | | Hot Air Balloon | Lookout Landing | Talk to Josha after finishing A Mystery in the Depths | | Dirigible | Abandoned Lurelin Mine, far southeast Depths | Mimufis Lightroot is the closest warp | | Bridge | Abandoned Hateno Mine, under Hateno Village | Free from the construct, no fight involved | | Bolt Boat | Abandoned Lanayru Mine, under Zora's Domain | Tied to a later Kohga rematch | | Rocket Platform | Abandoned Hebra Mine, on the Rito Village side | The Rito Village chasm drops you close | | Automated Ally | Abandoned Eldin Mine, next to the Fire Temple | Just talk to the construct | | Hovercraft | Abandoned Gerudo Mine, southwest Depths | Beat Kohga's airborne round first | | Beam Cycle | Cave behind the Shrine of Resurrection, Great Plateau | The only one on the surface; drop through the hole at the back, beat the two Yiga below | | Launch Pad | West Necluda Depths | Arusakam Lightroot nearby | | Instant Cannon | Akkala Highlands Depths | Kawikatisar Lightroot nearby | | Instant Scaffold | Gerudo Desert Depths | Tatayam Lightroot nearby |
A couple of these double as Kohga rematch arenas, so his side quest walks you straight to them whether you like it or not. Handy.
The mine circuit pays off beyond the stones, too. Mine tunnels are where the zonaite ore is thickest, several mines have a Forge Construct trading crystallized charges for battery upgrades, and every lightroot you activate on the way makes the Depths a little less miserable to cross. Treat the stone hunt as a sightseeing route and you'll come out of it rich.
Collecting Yiga Schematics
So why bother with Yiga stuff when the constructs give blueprints away for free? Because the Yiga designs are the fun ones. Tanks, monocycles, a raft with a kitchen bolted on. There are 34 of these hidden around the Depths, and each one lives in a Yiga hideout, usually a small outpost with a sealed storehouse hut in the middle.
The seal is the whole puzzle. Somewhere near that hut, a Yiga footsoldier patrols on a battle machine decorated with a matching seal emblem. That's the guard. Take out the guard, the seal on the door breaks, and the chest inside holds the schematic plus, most of the time, a Large Crystallized Charge. So every hideout is really a two-step job: find the guard, delete the guard.
Handling the guards
Guards ride a real mix of rigs. Some putter around on the ground, plenty circle the camp on flying machines, and a few perch way up on towers you can't climb to. The dependable answer is a bow. Leap off anything, pull the bow for that slow-motion midair shot, and hit the guard with a bomb flower arrow. One clean hit usually settles it.
Watch the camps themselves, too. Hideouts come wrapped in spiked fences, shock gates, and cliffside perches, and each one has some goofy built-in workaround, like Ultrahanding metal plates across an electric barrier or riding a floating platform up with Recall. Half the time you can skip the puzzle entirely and just paraglide in from above. The Yiga are big on theatrics, not so big on security.
Why the Yiga armor pays for itself
Before sweeping all 34 hideouts, go grab the Yiga armor set. The mask, the chest piece, and the tights are hidden at three surface spots: the Akkala Ancient Tech Lab, the Great Plateau, and Aldor Foothills. Wear all three at once and Yiga members flat out won't attack you. They think you're one of them.
That flips every hideout from a shootout into an errand. Stroll in, stand right next to the guard, and line up your shot at whatever pace you feel like. You still have to break each seal yourself, but nothing's shooting back while you do it. The set's defense is paper thin, though, so maybe swap out of it before picking a fight with anything bigger on the walk home.
Which ones to chase first
You don't need all 34. A few standouts worth prioritizing:
| Schematic | Hideout area | Why it's worth the stop | |---|---|---| | Beam Turret | Gerudo Desert Depths | Set it down near a camp and let it do the fighting while you hide | | Monocycle | Gerudo Highlands Depths | A tiny one-wheel runabout that's cheap to summon | | Tank | East Necluda Depths | An armored slab with a cannon, for camps you'd rather not sword by hand | | Instant Kitchen | Central Hyrule Depths | A portable cooking setup when you're nowhere near a pot | | Fishing Trawler | Great Hyrule Forest Depths | Shocks fish out of the water and scoops them up | | Bomb Bouquet | Central Hyrule Depths | A stacked pile of bomb flowers with a trigger. Loud, effective |
Every schematic you pocket is permanent. They sit in their own Schematics list, separate from your build history, and they never fall off. Sweep the Depths at your own pace, or grab three or four favorites and call it done. The game doesn't hand out a prize for all 34, so this is purely about which toys you want.
Using Zonaite for Missing Parts
So what happens when you Autobuild something and the parts just aren't there? That's what zonaite is for.
Pick a design and a ghostly preview appears with a purple ring around it. Any matching parts inside that ring get pulled in for free. A cart lying in the grass, a fan on the ground, loose logs, whatever fits the blueprint. Whatever's still missing, the game manufactures on the spot out of raw zonaite, at 3 zonaite a piece. A lone steering stick costs 3. The classic two-fan hover bike runs 9 from nothing. A twenty-part war machine would run 60, which is why nobody summons one of those from thin air twice.
The free pull is the whole trick, honestly. Stand next to junk before you build. Drop a fan and a steering stick out of your inventory, or hit a device dispenser first, and that same hover bike costs you nothing. Nine zonaite is cheap for instant flight, but free is better.
The green parts catch
Zonaite-made parts show up glowing green, and they come with one big rule: they don't come off. Try to wiggle one loose with Ultrahand and it crumbles on the spot, and the ore you spent crumbles with it. You can stick more things onto a green part, but you can't salvage it.
So check the preview before you confirm. If the ghost shows three green pieces and you've got a matching device sitting in your pocket, cancel, drop the device, rebuild. It's a small habit that saves a surprising amount of ore over a long session. The preview even shows you the total zonaite price up front, so there's no excuse for surprise bills.
Keeping ore in stock
Zonaite is basically everywhere in the Depths and nowhere else. The rock walls are flecked with glowing veins, and smashing them with any old weapon keeps a steady stream coming. The abandoned mines are thick with deposits, and Yiga you beat out of hiding drop a few pieces too. If you're sweeping hideouts for schematics, you're accidentally farming zonaite at the same time, which is a nice bit of scheduling.
Regular zonaite is the Autobuild currency. Large zonaite isn't for Autobuild, so feed that to a Forge Construct toward battery upgrades instead. And the battery matters more than it sounds here, because zonaite-built parts drain your energy cell exactly like real ones. A bigger battery means that 9-zonaite hover bike stays airborne long enough to actually be worth 9 zonaite.
Ballpark rule: keep 20 or 30 ore on you at all times and you'll pretty much never be stranded in a canyon with no way home.
Saving Reliable Favorites
Ever glued together the same bridge three times in one hour? That's the exact problem favorites solve.
Everything you stick together with Ultrahand gets logged automatically. Autobuild keeps your last 30 builds in a rolling history, and rolling means exactly what it sounds like: build a 31st thing and the oldest entry falls off the end, gone for good. Thirty sounds like plenty until a long building session quietly shoves your favorite machine off the cliff.
Favorites are the fix. Open Autobuild, scroll into the history list, highlight a build, and press Y. It gets pinned, and pinned builds are immune to the rolling delete. You get 8 favorite slots. Press Y again on a favorite to unpin it when something better comes along.
What earns a slot
Eight slots sounds generous until you're staring at slot seven with three machines still worth keeping. Some picks that hold up over a whole playthrough:
- Your traversal machine. For most people that's the two-fan hover bike. It's dirt cheap to summon from nothing and it goes basically anywhere.
- A cheap ground vehicle. A cart with a steering stick is 6 zonaite from thin air and it's way comfier than walking across rough terrain.
- A bridge or a log pile. Boring, but it'll bail you out of ravines and river crossings constantly.
- One combat answer, like a beam turret or cannon rig, for monster camps you'd rather not brawl through by hand.
Schema Stones and Yiga schematics don't need any of this protection, since they live in the permanent Schematics list already. Don't waste a pin on those. Pins are for your own builds, the ones history would eventually eat.
Small habits worth stealing
Check the zonaite price shown in the preview before you commit to a build, especially early on when your ore pile is thin. Rebuild a design near its real parts whenever you can, and only pay ore when you're genuinely stuck somewhere empty. And if you're the tinkering type, favorite your experiments before you take them apart, because the history list won't necessarily remember them for you.
One last thing: repinning is free. Swap your favorites around as often as you like, and keep the hover bike in slot one. Nine zonaite for a machine that crosses half of Hyrule is about the best deal this game ever offers you.