Skyrim players spent years fiercely debating a mysterious rumor that following wild foxes in the snowy wilderness would magically lead them to incredibly rare treasure chests.

A closer look

Skyrim players spent years fiercely debating a mysterious rumor that following wild foxes in the snowy wilderness would magically lead them to incredibly rare treasure chests. The game designers constantly denied programming any sort of magical treasure-hunting instincts into the digital animals, insisting the foxes were just running away randomly. It turns out the community was actually right, but only because of how the lazily coded artificial intelligence worked on a technical level. The fleeing foxes were simply programmed to heavily utilize complex navigation meshes to escape the player, which naturally caused them to run toward areas heavily saturated with interactive objects like hidden bandit camps and loot chests. Players mistook a deeply flawed pathfinding algorithm for a brilliant mythological Easter egg, showing that sometimes terrible coding looks exactly like intentional genius