With a game as big as Skyrim, it's no surprise that rumors floated around during its infancy. One popular belief that never had much evidence to back it up was that foxes could lead the player to treasure if they were followed. Inexplicably, many experienced this to be true, with foxes leading them to areas that were full of loot. This has confounded players for quite some time, and now one of the original developers of the game has weighed in and explained why this happens. It turns out it was not an intentional feature, and instead was caused by an oddity in how the foxes were programmed.
This explanation comes from Joel Burgess, though he name drops other developers such as Jean Simonet, Jonah Lobe, and Mark Teare as helping him figure out the answer. It's just one of many intersting things about Skyrim that fans are learning almost a full decade after the game's release.
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The basic explanation for what causes this behavior is how the game tells NPCs to move. The entirety of Skyrim's map is covered in a Navmesh, a grid of invisible, 3D triangles that tell NPCs, monsters, and animals where and how to move around the world. In areas that are dense with enemies, treasure, and things to do, the Navmesh is condensed into tons of smaller triangles. By contrast, sparse wilderness will be made up of fewer and larger triangles. The reason foxes seem to lead players to treasure is because the path they take when they run away is based on Navmesh triangles rather than actual distance from the player.
Another way to look at this is to think of the fox as trying to get 100 triangles away from the player as fast as it can. It will always take the most optimal path to do this, so it will prefer areas with several smaller triangles (such as Skryim's camps and areas with high concentrations of loot) rather than wilderness. When players follow a fox, it tends to lead them towards these areas by pure coincedence, as it just so happens that these denser areas are a faster way for foxes to reach their goal of 100 Navmesh triangles away.
Burgess makes it clear that this was never an intended feature, and describes the phenomenon as "a case of actual gameplay that NOBODY designed emerging from the bubbling cauldron of overlapping systems." Players often praise Skyrim for random events that seem like they must be scripted, but this takes the cake since it was never an intended feature at all. Despite this, it actually fits into the lore of how foxes are viewed in some cultures, just look at Ghost of Tsushima's foxes that intentionally have this feature.
Skyrim is available now on PC, PS3, PS4, Switch, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.