Ever since The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released almost a decade ago, fans have been quietly suspecting that foxes lead you to treasure, without ever knowing it for sure. Well now we do, thanks to some insight provided by a former developer.
Joel Burgess, formerly of Bethesda but currently studio director at Grindstone developers Capy, was inspired by the bee cart story from yesterday to share his own behind the scenes tale from the game’s development, this time involving that little urban myth about the foxes.
You can find all kinds of examples of people wondering about this, some from just after the game’s release, others years later, each of them saying they’d either heard someone else say it, or seen it a few times themselves, without anyone ever being able to actually prove that foxes will lead the player to treasure.
Turns out they do! Well, sort of. Burgess has explained “the myth of the treasure fox” is actually down to the creature’s pathfinding abilities, and how it was programmed to leg it from the player if it ever got spooked. He explains it in great detail below, but if the tweets don’t load, a very broad summary is that basically foxes were designed to get spooked and run away from the player, and when choosing where to run to would, thanks to a quirk of the way the map was created, head towards the parts of the map that contained the most items.
Which would invariably be the same caves and camps that contained loot.
The usual suspects got interrogated – myself, @jean_simonet @Jonahlobe and @Markiepo0 , among others. Nobody confessed.
I got curious and started digging around in the scripts – nothing.
So if nobody MADE this behavior, what’s up?
Jean figured it out. (as usual)
— Joel Burgess (@JoelBurgess) August 18, 2021
In most situations, you’re seeing AI decide what do to (run at player, hide in cover, etc), use navmesh to make a path, and navigate along that path.
Foxes are no different. But their AI is very simplified: they basically can *only* run away.
If you spook a fox, it flees. pic.twitter.com/UZdDm1BPiK
— Joel Burgess (@JoelBurgess) August 18, 2021
To contrast, there’s also “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.
— Joel Burgess (@JoelBurgess) August 18, 2021
This is where understanding of how Skyrim uses navmesh comes in.
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. pic.twitter.com/zojgTXQzHI
— Joel Burgess (@JoelBurgess) August 18, 2021
You see where this is going?
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. pic.twitter.com/6dETjBSLi0
— Joel Burgess (@JoelBurgess) August 18, 2021
So there you have it! Mystery solved. Foxes will frequently lead you to treasure, if only because they’re designed to flee to the same spots on the map where treasure is usually found. Which may not be as clean an answer as “yes they point straight to treasure”, but the end result is the same, so whatever!
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