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Why wild foxes led you to treasure in Skyrim
- adrianN 5y agoI expected some reference so some country's lore where foxes did that, but the real explanation is actually much nicer.
- notanzaiiswear 5y agoThat country with that lore is now Skyrim. Would be funny if it would spill over into the real world or into other games.
- js8 5y agoPerhaps NPCs should mention it, on occasion.
- cfj 5y agoIn Ghost of Tsushima, foxes lead the player to shrines, which grant certain items. In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you can befriend dogs by feeding them and they'll lead you to treasure. Not foxes sure, but almost the same thing. I wonder if the developers of these games were inspired by Skyrim's "feature".
- ewidar 5y agoI don't know for sure, but there is quite a lot of lore around foxes and dogs, see Kitsune and Komainu for example. Since Zelda is a Nintendo game and Ghost of Tsushima is set in Japan, I would think it has more to do with real world lore than a reference to Skyrim.
- rightbyte 5y agoI recall that in Ocarina of Time there was a dog in the windmill village that lead you somewhere when you gave it food? Might remember wrong though.
- delecti 5y agoThere was a dog in Hyrule Castle Town that you had to "befriend" (stand vaguely near for a few seconds), and the dog's owner rewarded you with a Heart Piece if you returned it to her. I don't remember any significant dogs in Kakariko Village (where the windmill was), or the ability to give food to any of them.
- rightbyte 5y agoOh. Ye that is probably what I was thinking about. The windmill village was throwing chickens into a hen house.
- ohgodplsno 5y agoJapan has this, in a way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsune https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsune. Ghost of Tsushima makes it an explicit way to find treasures.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoI don't know about Japan, but as far as I know the fox tradition in China has no element of leading people anywhere. Foxes, like anything else, may practice various magical arts notably including shapeshifting. (They are much more common as the subject of stories than other things are, but not very different in kind.) They may pursue any number of idiosyncratic goals. A common theme is that they take the form of a human woman and have sex with a human man; this may either be benign behavior or something more nefarious such as a way to slowly drain the man's life force. The sexual theme is so common that 狐狸精 "fox spirit" became a term of abuse for overly sexual women. Chinese people like to translate the term into English as "vixen".
- Symmetry 5y agoKnowing the Elder Scrolls games it's going to be in the lore going forward, never fear.
- SigmundA 5y agoSeems similar to gravity compressing spacetime causing matter to pathfind towards itself. Treasure compresses navmesh causing a kind of gravity for the Fox AI pathfinding. So in a way spacetime could be thought of as a navmesh that the simulation for the universe uses to path objects.
- evanjonr 5y agoHaving to login to Twitter to read a thread is really annoying.
- SilverRed 5y agoI know this is an overused trope but I have had enough of every social media platform becoming increasingly hostile and annoying. It's like they have hit the cap of how many people on the planet are actually interested in signing up for twitter and now have to tighten the screws on every aspect to try to force the last bits of possible growth. Dumb question I know, but why can't we just have platforms that are satisfied with what they are and not expect constant growth at any cost.
- yholio 5y agoBecause if you do, your competitors won't, and will poach your customers with hard sell techniques until they reach a network effect required to make you irrelevant. In the long run, there can be only one, the little diversity we have is the effect of national network effects established in the first years of growth that proved hard to overcome, especially Twitter in US. Without US, Twitter will be steamrolled and you will only have exotic alternatives like vkontakte and weibo.
- Guest42 5y agoThat’s a good point. If I had to guess, I think over time there is a natural limit to the amount of user saturation. People are mostly aware of the platforms and their features and have probably made up their minds as to whether they want to join. Parts of the existing user base are probably getting sick of the engagement and lessening their usage.
- convery 5y agoYep, platforms are getting silly. On Reddit the other day I got the usual popup about accepting cookies, but once clicked, instead of just setting the cookie it showed a popup saying that I need to switch to the new theme to accept cookies. As in, I'm forced to use their new theme just to click a button and then switch back to using the old theme (like any sane person).
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoThe most awful format ever; A chain of tweets interspersed with memes. This should be a blog post, but I guess that's too 1999 for the author. So why do foxes lead you to treasure? Answer: They pathfind away from player not by euclidian "distance", but simply by number of navmesh polygons. The game world has uneven navmesh density, with points of interest (locations often housing treasure) having a higher number of polygons, so the foxes tend to pathfind their escape path into them.
- crackercrews 5y agoTwitter doesn't let me view the thread because I'm not logged in. Is this A/B testing a new "feature" or is this their new rule?
- hn_go_brrrrr 5y agoHappened to me too. Switch to desktop mode.
- whoooooo123 5y agoYes, I've noticed Twitter has started doing this in the last few days. I'd like to thank the bean counters at Twitter, because I'm not going to sign in, so this new feature means I'm going to spend a lot less time on Twitter.
- foresto 5y agoAny nitter instance can help with such things. Here's one: https://nitter.nixnet.services/joelburgess/status/1428008043556622336 https://nitter.nixnet.services/joelburgess/status/1428008043... P.S. Nitter also puts RSS links at the top of everyone's timeline, which is handy if you would rather use an RSS reader than a Twitter app.
- photon-torpedo 5y agoJust installed "Nitter Redirect" browser extension. Thank you, Twitter, for finally making me avoid your site entirely.
- senkora 5y agoUnrolled to avoid login requirement: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428008043556622336.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428008043556622336.html
- Tenoke 5y agoI see it fine logged out.
- ace2358 5y agoI don’t. I either login or sign up. If I click the little x (which used to work) it takes me back. iOS 14.whatever is mostly latest.
- mediumdeviation 5y agoIf you have an adblocker with element hiding capability (I don't think any iOS ones do), hiding the #layers element removes the modal but you still cannot scroll. If you have a userstyles extension, this works for me #layers { display: none !important; } html { overflow: auto !important; }
- distances 5y agoI also see the thread just fine. Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin.
- colinmhayes 5y agoIt works for me on desktop, but not mobile.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throaway46546 5y agoOpen links in a new tab.
- socialist_coder 5y ago> The Fox isn't trying to get 100 meters away - it's trying to get 100 triangles away. Maybe this is obvious but I'm not seeing it... Why would an NPC measure distance in triangles instead of meters? Why is it trying to get 100 triangles away?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- korijn 5y agoTo avoid the conversion (and more complicated path finding algorithm) and use less cpu, I would think. Game dev is all about the cpu budget in order to achieve a target frame rate.
- kevingadd 5y agoIn particular if you're doing pathing for tons of npcs (as they are) you really want to keep that optimized. In Guild Wars at launch for one of our expansions we had huge CPU issues with our game servers - it turned out designers had laid down really long elaborate paths for NPCs like guards and townspeople and the server was calculating all those paths at once when players entered a new zone, so it was saturating the game server. I had to build an auditing tool so we could scan all the zones for long paths and replace them with simple ones. Bethesda has been building this specific type of game for decades so at this point things like npcs having complex patrols or other behavior is something they've figured out how to do well.
- jeofken 5y agoI played a lot of Guild Wars when I was a teenager with my friends! We were very glad to have a MMO that was fun and had raids, even though we couldn’t afford the other ones with a monthly cost. It was also prettier than other games. I still remember many of the locations :)
- hadlock 5y agoHindsight is 20/20
- kuu 5y agoI love this kind of pattern emergence. It's interesting to see how simple models can create complex behaviors, even by chance
- ralusek 5y agoEspecially when it feels right. Foxes would lead you to treasure.
- arcturus17 5y agoWait, why? I'd imagine foxes would flee to burrows or just about any hole where they can hide, but why would there be any treasure there?
- galgalesh 5y agoI'm playing Skyrim now and the thought that the foxes would lead me to treasure has indeed popped into my mind. I followed one for a while but it didn't lead me anywhere notable. Most animals either do a really good job of running away from you (rabbits, deer), or attack you (lions, walruses). Foxes just look at you and slowly walk into a certain direction when you get close to them, as if they're trying to show you something. In general also, from watching YouTube videos of rescue foxes, they seem like super playful and might be the kind of animals leading you to treasure just for the fun of it.
- twic 5y agoTIL my bins are full of treasure.
- toomanybeersies 5y agoMy favourite instance of emergent behaviour in video games is cats dying from alcohol poisoning after eating alcohol-laced vomit in Dwarf Fortress, and the bug reports/forum posts trying to determine what was killing the cats: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=154425.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=154425.0 https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9195 https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9195
- LudwigNagasena 5y agoI hate Twitter and their hostile anti-user behavior. Wasn’t there a service that blogerized Twitter chains? It would be nice if people took a habit of using it.
- EricE 5y agothreadreaderapp.com
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jongorer 5y ago0.0.0.0 twitter.com
- uyt 5y agoIt's amazing how good humans are at detecting these sorts of patterns. For another example, in minecraft, people noticed you can find diamonds if you dig straight down from clay patches. At first I dismissed it as superstition but it turns out that are technical reasons for why! You can watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Icj5TNmBUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Icj5TNmBUI for details but the tldr is that due to how minecraft seeds their linear congruential random number generator, whenever there aren't carries/overflows the coordinates are always a fixed offset away.
- erhk 5y agoTwitter now is blocking out of app mobile usage it seems. Attempting to unfurl the thread of tweets gives me a popup
- fakedang 5y agoNo issues on Android using Brave browser. I didn't login.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Kye 5y agoThis is why you should always trust foxes.
- beezischillin 5y agoThis made me smile, it sounds like a digital fairytale. A mathematical optimisation causing foxes to lead people to treasure, it sounds so surreal but insanely cool!
- SwiftyBug 5y agoYes! It sounds like something that you could find in The Program audio series.
- virwheeler 5y agoWhat's with the title? I haven't encountered a fox that leads me into a treasure in Skyrim. Should I clock in for additional hours?
- spywaregorilla 5y agoWhat happens if you chase a fox to the treasure? Does it just sit a short physical distance but large triangle distance away from you and think it's safe?
- moss2 5y agoToo bad I can't view threads without creating a Twitter account. Might've been a good read; I'll never know.