Shoving a bucket on a poor merchant’s head just to rifle through their coffers and steal back legendary artifacts, like a certain Golden Claw, is as core to Skyrim’s identity as the dragons and magical shouts. It just wouldn’t be the same without derpy NPCs idly chattering away while you grab their most prized possessions in front of them.

But for the dev team, it was a total surprise; nobody anticipated the community using the game’s snappy physics to make themselves completely undetectable, and it wasn’t ever something that they considered testing. You could say the community pulled the bucket over their eyes on this little trick.

“That was completely an accident, by the way,” designer Bruce Nesmith said in an interview with FRVR. “I don’t think we even tried to put a bucket on anybody’s head during development. It didn’t come out until the game came out!”

The Bucket Trick Was Discovered Almost Immediately

With buckets on the brain (hopefully, not literally – I’d like to keep my prized possessions), I wanted to unearth the ‘origins’ of this glitch, and while many players no doubt found it independently, I did find a video from a day after launch. On November 12, 2011, YouTuber TDKPyrostasis crackled over their fuzzy mic that they had found what they liked to call “the bucket trick”.

It’s really endearing to look back at what people thought 13 years ago, worrying and pleading with Bethesda not to patch this little exploit, and while some wikis do claim that the trick no longer works, and that the bucket pops off if you try it, as you can see in the newly minted featured image of this article, it’s absolutely viable 13 years later. It just takes a bit of finagling.

Unfortunately, however, the trick doesn’t work in Starfield, so it probably won’t in The Elder Scrolls 6, but I doubt that’ll stop players from finding other oddball ways to swipe everything not nailed down. After all, in Oblivion, the trick was to shove NPCs out of the room.