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When developing games, especially large-scale ones, mistakes are inevitable in the early stages of production. According to one of the original developers of Part 5 of The Elder Scrolls, Skyrim is no exception. A unique loophole is said to have led to the spontaneous creation of a junk planet.
Nate Purcapile, Skyrim’s lighting supervisor, recently published on Twitter a funny story about the development process of the iconic game.
Its story is about a huge sphere made up of individual game pieces hovering over a tundra landscape. Due to its size and design, it has been called a junk planet.
The developer claimed that in the game engine, individual workers could only access small parts of the world, without the ability to edit outside of them. However, there have been cases where some elements have accidentally or completely intentionally got out of the edit box.
When this happened, the objects seemed to disappear, leading many team members to believe they had been removed. However, this was far from the truth.
It turned out that all the objects that passed through the closed zones moved to the 0,0,0 position – at the center point of the map, eventually creating a flying lump of discarded materials.
However, this connection was discovered relatively late, as according to Nate, the mysterious planet was removed several times during the game’s development.
From time to time someone cleaned up this pile of garbage. However, it reappeared every time. Why couldn’t people move objects out of busy areas? Why have they been moved to a central point on the map? Who knows. Playing games is difficult, you always find new problems to solve. This incident didn’t spoil the game at all, it was just fun. Removing it was much easier than making changes to the game’s code. We fought a battle against a slow-growing junk planet and won it.
The anomaly was eventually resolved before the game was released. However, as you can see, it remained in the hearts of those who participated in the development of Skyrim as a positive lesson.
