Dropping a bucket on a poor merchant's head, rifling through his treasure and stealing legendary artifacts like a certain Golden Claw are as basic to Skyrim's identity as dragons and magical screams. It just wouldn't be the same without derpy NPCs as you chatter in front of them holding their most prized possessions.
But for the dev team, it was a complete surprise; No one anticipated the community using the game's snappy physics to make themselves completely undetectable, and it was never something they considered a test. You can tell the community pulled a bucket over their eyes at this little trick.
“That was totally an accident, by the way,” said designer Bruce Nesmith in an interview with FRVR. “I don't think we ever tried to put a bucket over anyone's head during development. It didn't come out until the game came out!”
With buckets in mind (hopefully, not literally – I want to keep my precious assets), I wanted to find the 'origin' of this problem, and although many players found it independently, I found a video a day after launch. On November 12, 2011, YouTuber TDKPyrostasis cracked on their fuzzy mic to discover what they like to call “The Bucket Trick”.
Funnily enough, his first example was with a kettle, but it's not that catchy.
It's really interesting to look back at what people thought 13 years ago, worrying and asking Bethesda not to patch this little exploit, and some wikis claim that this trick doesn't work anymore, and if you try it the bucket pops off, as you can see in the newly minted featured image of this article, it's perfectly possible after 13 years. It just takes a little finishing.
Unfortunately, however, the trick doesn't work in Starfield, so it probably won't be in The Elder Scrolls 6, but I doubt that will stop players from finding other oddball ways to swipe everything. After all, in Oblivion, the trick was to push NPCs out of the room.
- issued
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November 11, 2011
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Alcohol use, blood and gore, intense violence, sexual themes
- Engine
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creation
- Extensions
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Skyrim: Dragonborn, Skyrim: Hearthfire, Skyrim: Dawnguard
