There's a longstanding myth amongst Skyrim players that foxes lead you to treasure. As it turns out, that's partially true, but not because Skyrim's foxes were deliberately made that way.
Inspired by the recent story about Skyrim's intro cart and the immovable bee courtesy of former Skyrim dev Nathan Purkeypile, another Skyrim developer has come forward to finally solve the mystery of the treasure fox.
Joel Burgess used to be a level designer on Skyrim, but these days he heads up Capybara Games. His story of Skyrim's treasure fox is a charming tale of how game development can be hard but can sometimes lead to happy accidents.
It turns out that Bethesda was just as surprised as anyone else to hear that foxes lead you to treasure in Skyrim. Shortly after the game's initial release, Burgess investigated the phenomena and eventually found the answer with the help of Jean Simonet.
First, we have to understand a bit about the fox's AI, which is tuned to always flee from the player. Next, we have to understand how NPCs determine their own movement in a game like Skyrim. While players might see beautiful vistas, cliffs, and a bandit encampment, NPC AIs see an overlay of polygons with instructions coded into it. This overlay is called "navmesh," and this mesh gets denser the closer you are to a point of interest.
Points of interest in Skyrim could be anything, from the start of a new quest to a random encounter location, but in general, POIs in Skyrim also have stuff for the player to loot.
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The fox AI is always trying to flee the player, but when it's determining a path it's doing so in a way that goes from navmesh to navmesh, not straight-line distance.
"The Fox isn't trying to get 100 meters away – it's trying to get 100 triangles away," writes Burgess, referring to how navmesh locations appear in Skyrim's engine. "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."
Foxes aren’t necessarily leading you to treasure, but they are leading you to locations that are likely to have treasure. Thus, the myth of the treasure fox was born. Probably the best story of Skyrim’s development we’ve read thus far, but maybe this one will inspire another former Skyrim dev to tell an even taller tale.
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