According to one of Skyrim‘s original developers, the game once had a massive ball of trash floating above the tundras of the snowy territory during its development. Dubbed the “trash planet” by developers, the anomaly was deleted before the game was officially released.
Speaking in an interview with Digital Trends ahead of Skyrim‘s ten year anniversary, Nate Purkeypile, who worked on lighting for the game’s various caves and castles, revealed that the game had a strange habit when it came to misplaced objects.
“You would have the loaded area of wherever you were working, right?” Purkeypile tells Digital Trends. “And sometimes you would just drag stuff outside of that and it would kind of vanish. People were like ‘OK, well maybe it deleted it or something.'”
As it turns out, that wasn’t the case. Instead, the game was moving every object to “the origin point of the world, the center where it all starts from. All that stuff would get dragged out of someone’s loaded area and just go to this one spot. So what ended up happening was there was this ball above the tundra where it would all accumulate so it looked like a planet of trash, and rocks, and trees, and who knows what else,” Purkeypile said.
Skyrim‘s developers ended up having to delete the trash planet over and over again, as people would drag objects out of their areas and they’d reappear in that one spot. The trash planet even affected the game’s performance, tanking its frame rate while it was loaded in.
A rerelease of Skyrim titled Skyrim Anniversary Edition is available now and adds a suite of creation club content to the now decade-old game.
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