Skyrim's Treasure Foxes Were A Complete Accident, Dev Reveals

The mystery of Skyrim foxes seemingly leading players to treasure has been explained by former Skyrim dev Joel Burgess in a Twitter thread. Not a feature intentionally implemented, the foxes appeared to “guide” players to hidden rewards due to the game's navmesh--a 3D sheet of polygons overlaid on the environment that directs the paths of AI.

According to Burgess' explanation, Skyrim foxes had a simple AI: They were programmed to only flee away when encountered. So why would they flee towards areas of treasure? It's because sites where treasure were hidden--like campsites and ruins--contained more complex triangles than wilderness locations. So if a fox is programmed to flee 100 triangles, then it would gravitate towards running to areas with lots of triangles, which tend to be aforementioned areas of complexity like ruins and camps.

That's why if players followed a fox in Skyrim, they were likely to encounter areas with hidden treasures. It's a pretty neat story of how unintentional gameplay emerged from a confluence of different systems.

Another dev, Nate Purkeypile shared a Skyrim development story too. The famous cart ride in Skyrim's opening scene took a lot of tweaking to get right, since the cart was physically stimulated and objects like a rock too close to the road could cause the cart to fly off the rails.

In a notable bug incident, the devs discovered that a bee (a bee!) was causing the cart to shoot "up in the sky like a rocket." It turned out that in a prior fix of a bee bug, the collision feature put on the insect to fix the issue of players being unable to pick it up also made it collide into objects. Hence when the bee encountered the cart, it became an immovable object. Since the cart couldn't go forward, it could only go up in the sky.

While the long-clamored for next Elder Scrolls game is probably a ways off, Bethesda's Todd Howard revealed that the new game will use an updated version of Skyrim's Creation Engine.