A mystery surrounding the behavior of foxes in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been solved almost a decade after the game first launched. That mystery is: Why do foxes in Skyrim lead you to treasure?
It’s behavior often discussed by Skyrim players, but never actually proven to be an intentional feature of the game. It turns out not to be intentional, but definitely happens. The explanation offers a fascinating insight into how games work and why such quirks can occur without even the developers realizing.
Joel Burgess is the Studio Director at Capybara Games, but from 2006-2016 he was a Senior Designer at Bethesda Games Studios and worked on Skyrim. In a Twitter thread posted yesterday he tackled the fox question, and with the help of former Bethesda AI and System Programmer Jean Simonet, solved the mystery.
Burgess explains that the fox AI is setup to always run away when encountering the player. In order to do that it needs to know how to navigate the environment. This is handled by something called a navigation mesh, more commonly referred to as “navmesh,” which is basically an invisible layer of triangles on top of the Skyrim landscape containing just enough information for AI characters to know where they can (e.g. a path) or can’t (e.g. a river) navigate.
If the landscape is open fields, the navmesh is very simple and only consists of a few large triangles. If it’s a built-up or complex area, such as a town or cave system, then the navmesh needs to be much more complex and contains lots of smaller triangles. This is key to the explanation of why a fox leads you to treasure.
Developers are always fighting to keep in-game systems and artificial intelligence as simple as possible because they only have so much performance available to work with. For a simple AI like a fox, fleeing from the player needs to be implemented using as little processing power as possible. So instead of working out the best place and an exact distance for a fox to run to, Burgess says, “The Fox isn’t trying to get 100 meters away – it’s trying to get 100 triangles away.” The fox is simply told to move 100 navmesh triangles away from its current location.
The unintended side effect of this is that a fox is going to navigate to the more complex areas of the world near to them simply because there are more triangles and it can get 100 triangles away more quickly/efficiently. And typically the more complex areas of the world are also where the treasure/loot has been hidden by the Skyrim designers.
So there you have it, mystery solved! The foxes are leading players to treasure, but it’s because of triangles, not some desire to convince the player to stop following them by presenting them with a gift.
