Skyrim developer debunks the decade-long "Myth of the Treasure Fox"

Skyrim
(Image credit: Bethesda, CamKitty / NexusMods)

A former Skyrim developer has explained why players have spent almost ten years arguing over whether or not foxes lead the dovahkiin to treasure troves.

If you're not familiar with "the myth of the treasure fox," as developer Joel Burgess dubs the phenomenon, it stems from players in the early days of the game claiming that if you stumble across one of the creatures, you should follow it. Pursue it far enough, those players allege, and it'll eventually lead you to an undiscovered location that you can loot for a tidy profit.

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According to Burgess, that line of thinking is only half-true. As Bethesda started noticing increasing numbers of players talking about 'treasure foxes', the studio began to investigate where this behaviour might have stemmed from. Nobody had deliberately scripted this behaviour, so where was it coming from?

The answer lay in the game's AI navigation. Skyrim uses a system called 'navmesh', "an invisible 3D sheet of polygons that is laid over the world, telling AI where it can and cannot go." Once an NPC had decided what action it wanted to take, it would use navmesh to make a path to allow it to take that action. Foxes, with their relatively simple AI, can only run away from the player, but they still use navmesh to do so.

In Skyrim's grand open wilderness, the navmesh is very simple - very few triangles (the basic shape used to construct more complex, in-game shapes) are needed to create a field with a few rocks and trees. By contrast, significantly more triangles are required to build a point of interest like a camp or a homestead. 

In the real world, a fox might try to put as much distance as possible between itself and a potential predator, but in Skyrim, Burgess explains that "the fox isn't trying to get 100 metres away - it's trying to get 100 *triangles* away." That's hard work out in the empty tundra, so a pathfinding fox will make a beeline for more complex areas, which Bethesda filled with treasure to encourage players to explore. That means that "foxes aren't leading you to treasure - but the way they behave is leading them to areas that tend to HAVE treasure."

Earlier this week, another former dev outlined how a single bee almost ruined the game's iconic opening scene, and Burgess' story is yet another example of the fascinating development process behind Skyrim. Even if it's not great news for the foxes.

Want a brand-new experience, ten years on? Here's our list of the best Skyrim mods.

Ali Jones
News Editor

I'm GamesRadar's news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.