When Todd Howard said that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim had infinite quests through its Radiant system, a Skyrim player's Xbox Live profile may have taken that statement rather literally – by showing a number of completed quests in the billions. Few people can deny that Skyrim took the gaming world by storm when it launched in 2011. It was the water cooler title of its day, and it still remains in the limelight over a decade after. Whether that's a product of its unprecedented modding community, the simple-yet-powerful sandbox Bethesda developed, or the endless editions of Skyrim, the game still has secrets to reveal and plenty of fun to offer.
From Skyrim players making their own Skooma, to killing Nazeem every day until the next Elder Scrolls game launches, fans certainly know how to make Tamriel their second home. However, for a game that was notoriously buggy at launch to the point that it still necessitates a Community Patch mod, this recent incident takes place outside Skyrim for once.
Fearless Khajiit posted a hastily taken photo of their Xbox Live account on the official Skyrim subreddit, sharing their confusion about seemingly having completed over four billion quests in the game. To make things even more impressive, Fearless Khajiit achieved this inhuman feat in just over fifteen days of played time. Putting this number into full context makes it even more hilarious: it implies that Fearless Khajiit completed 11,702,908 quests per hour on average – or to be even more precise – 3,250 per hour. Unfortunately, no amount of moon sugar would ever make a Khajiit that fast.
As hilarious as this Skyrim incident may be, there is actually a very simple reason why the glitch occurred on Fearless Khajiit's Xbox Live account. The maximum value of an unsigned 32-bit integer is 4,294,967,296 – which is a number higher than Fearless Khajiit's completed quests by a value of two. It's quite likely that something caused the quest counter to bug out, and when it attempted to retract a quest from the player while the counter was at 0, it caused the value to overflow. Taking this into consideration, one can't help but wonder if Fearless Khajiit will find themselves back at 0 in a few quests from now.
Though the game still enjoys its popularity, Skyrim celebrated its 11th Anniversary last month. Its players are slowly turning their gaze towards the future, be it through a temporary distraction in Starfield, or patiently waiting for The Elder Scrolls 6 to release. While not much is known about the sequel yet, it will hopefully provide a new adventure in Tamriel to rival that of the Dragonborn's in Skyrim.
The Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim: Anniversary Edition is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.