Skyrim's 'treasure fox' myth has been explained

A fox in front of a treasure chest in the Legacy of the Dragonborn mod
(Image credit: Bethesda)

Recently, ex-Bethesda artist Nate Purkeypile took to Twitter to tell the story of how during development the cart in Skyrim's intro was defeated by a single bee. Joel Burgess, another former Bethesda employee who worked on Skyrim as a level designer, chimed in with some more detail on that particular bug (are bees bugs? Never mind), and has now returned with another behind-the-scenes story from Skyrim development—the tale of the treasure fox.

If you play Skyrim long enough you might have heard that if you follow a wild fox, it'll lead you to a location with loot. Arguments about whether this is true go back almost a decade. As Burgess explains, there is actually some truth in it, though foxes weren't designed this way deliberately.

Skyrim AI is programmed to follow the navmesh, an invisible layer of triangles that tells it which areas of the world it can walk on. "In most situations," says Burgess, "you're seeing AI decide what to do (run at player, hide in cover, etc), use navmesh to make a path, and navigate along that path."

Why does this mean foxes gravitate to loot? We'll get there. First, you need to understand NPCs have multiple varieties of pathfinding. There's high process, which is "the most fancy, cpu-intensive pathfinding. It uses the full navmesh and will do things like line of sight and distance checks." Then there's low process, "used for stuff like NPCs walking a trade route across the world. These are only updated every several minutes, and position is tracked very loosely. The bandit stabbing your face, however, is running nav stuff many times per second."

Somewhere in the middle is a level of pathfinding used for NPCs who are too near the character to get away with low process, but whose behavior is too simple to demand CPU-intensive high process pathfinding. Like foxes, who just run away from you.

"This is where understanding of how Skyrim uses navmesh comes in", Burgess goes on. "Swaths of the outdoor world have simple navmesh.  You don't need to add lots of detail in a space with basic topography, little clutter, or a low chance of combat. So wilderness = small number of big triangles." By contrast, areas with extra visual detail and/or NPCs have more, smaller triangles. 

"The Fox isn't trying to get 100 meters away - it's trying to get 100 *triangles* away. You know where it's easy to find 100 triangles?  The camps/ruins/etc that we littered the world with, and filled with treasure to reward your exploration."

So there you have it, the myth of the treasure fox does have a basis in reality. Foxes are more likely to lead you to a point of interest than to an empty bit of wilderness, but that doesn't necessarily mean loot. It could mean a bunch of NPCs hanging out, or a cave bear that will maul you to death.

"Emergent Gameplay is often used to describe designed randomness," Burgess concludes, "but this is a case of actual gameplay that NOBODY designed emerging from the bubbling cauldron of overlapping systems. And I think that's beautiful."

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

Read more
Skyrim intro cinematic skill - Hey, you. You're finally awake.
A Skyrim dev broke the game before launch when they made thousands of tiny ants cast individual shadows: 'Why is the game running so slow?'
A fungus-infected bear attacking in Avowed.
Avowed is overrun with bears and I need to find out why
Skyrim man fighting a wolf
Skyrim was 'personally rebalanced' by producer Jeff Gardiner just 2 weeks before launch: 'Well, I hope this is good'
Starfield: Shattered Space
By the time Bethesda was on Starfield, you'd 'basically get in trouble' for breaking schedule, says former dev: 'A lot of the great stuff within Skyrim came from having the freedom to do what you want'
Skyrim warrior performing shout
A bizarre mod that adds human poop to Skyrim led me on an enlightening journey into Viking sanitation: 'Your world will certainly be more immersive, but it will also certainly smell worse'
The cover art for Majora's Mask showing Link and various other characters from the game.
I'm enraptured by this Zelda maniac who worked out there are 1 quadrillion 83 trillion 414 billion and 90 million possible permutations for a dog race in Majora's Mask
Latest in RPG
Wuk Lamat, a character in Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail, stares in an unimpressed manner.
'I can't really say what they were thinking' says whistleblowing modder, as Final Fantasy 14's attempt to thwart stalkers falls terribly short of the mark
Raidou Kuzonoha and pals, looking like they've about to drop the most fire single of the 1930s
Raidou Remastered is finally bringing the historical Shin Megami Tensei supernatural sleuth spinoff to PC this June
Greedfall 2
Greedfall 2 aims to turn around a disastrous early access launch with a combat overhaul and a big new boat
Dancing Green in Final Fantasy 14.
Final Fantasy 14's latest raids have me fully convinced that Square Enix can still cook, even as job design lags behind
kingdom come deliverance 2 thunderstone quest
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's masterful quest design can be summed up by one wonderfully weird search for a magic stone
The heroes are attacked by monsters
Pillars of Eternity is getting turn-based combat to mark its 10th anniversary, and that means PC Gamer editors will soon be arguing about combat mechanics again
Latest in News
SUQIAN, CHINA - OCTOBER 6, 2024 - Illustration Tencent's plan to buy Ubisoft, Suqian, Jiangsu province, China, October 6, 2024. (Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
Ubisoft and Tencent are forming a new company that will take control of its most successful franchises: Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six
A motley crew riding out in point-and-click adventure Rosewater
Promising '90s style point-and-clicker Rosewater rides out today, featuring trail-worn cowpoke authors and weird alt-universe science
A girl cheering in Everybody's Golf Hot Shots.
My favourite, most underrated anime golf game series is actually getting a PC entry for the first time in its nearly 30-year history
A shock trap transformed into a Lego brick in Monster Hunter Wilds.
A modder keeps turning Monster Hunter traps into Lego bricks so that the monsters will know true pain, and they've just done it again
live action Jimbo the Jester from Balatro holding a playing card and addressing the camera
You've probably been pronouncing Balatro wrong all along, but 'it's kind of a gif/jif situation'
A late afternoon view shows two young women walking past a wall-sized anime mural along Chuo-dori (Central Avenue) in the Akihabara district (known as Electric Town for its maze of electronics stores, but currently considered an almost sacred destination by members of Japan's otaku culture, drawn to Akihabara's video game centers, maid cafes, anime shops, and manga comics), located in Chiyoda Ward in central Tokyo, Japan.
OpenAI's GPT-4o model gets image generation update for all of your anime-style selfie needs