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How Many Trees Are There in Skyrim? | Any Austin | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: How Many Trees Are There in Skyrim?
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Summary
Core Theme
This content details an ambitious project to determine the exact number of trees in the video game Skyrim through a series of estimation methods and a competition among content creators, culminating in the reveal of the official count.
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How many trees are there in Skyrim?
Don't look it up. Don't read the
comments. Just think about it for a
second. You think there are more than a
thousand, more than 10,000, 100,000? I'm
sure it's obvious, but today that's what
we're going to try to figure out. And
we're going to do it without using any
mods. I'm literally going to go inside
Skyrim as a character, walk around, and
just count them like 1 2 3. You know,
once I think I know how many there are,
we're going to get someone to dig into
the game files, figure out the actual
number, and see how close we actually
got. But in order to make this really
fun, I'm not going to be the only one
guessing. I've enlisted the help of 10
other incredible creators and one very
special guest, each of whom will also
try to guess the number of trees. And
then at the end of the video, we're
going to see who was closest to the real
number. And whoever was wins a $10,000
donation to the charity of their choice.
Surprise. Now, I'm sure you have a lot
of questions like which trees actually
count and what even qualifies as a tree.
And I will answer all of those questions
shortly. But first, I want you to think
of your own guess. You can even write it
down in the comments if you want to and
then compare your guess to the very
first number from one of our guest participants.
participants.
Hello, internet. My name is Matthew
Patrick, better known online as Matt
Pat, and I have been asked the question,
how many trees are there in Skyrim?
Yes, that is an example of a tree. Thank
you for the camera work there. Taking it
at face value and assuming, you know, if
I were just to put out a number out
there into the world, I'm going to guess 83,762
trees. That's my guess. Good luck. Okay,
so Matt Pat himself, possibly the most
qualified person on the planet for this
particular question outside of an actual
forest surveyor, thinks there are 83,762
trees in Skyrim. We will see if he's
right later on. Now, when I first came
up with this idea, which was actually
inspired by a joke comment someone made
on one of my community posts, I
legitimately thought I was just going to
be able to open up Skyrim, pick a
starting point, and then just walk
around and count the trees by hand. You
know, I thought it would take maybe a
few hours, but with a little bit of
patience, I could pull it off and have a
perfectly accurate count within a day or
two, but I was very wrong about that. Oh
my god, how am I going to Okay, maybe
that's like 10, 20, 30, 50, and then
maybe like 50. There are clearly a lot
of trees in Skyrim. Way more than I
initially thought. And it was obvious I
was going to need a more sophisticated
system for trying to count them. So, I
decided we would basically do three
levels of guessing, each one more
complicated than the last one. So, to
start, we're just going to eyeball it.
You know, vibe it out, which basically
meant, you know, running around forested
areas, rapidly counting as many trees as
I could, and then just finding a high
enough vantage point that I could see
far enough to guess how many there might
be in a total area. Sort of like a
weird, very immersive version of a jelly
bean counting contest. I thought there
were maybe 7,000 trees near Faulkreth,
maybe 8,000 or so around Morthol here,
10,000 down here in the aspen forests
near Riftton. It wasn't perfect, but I
thought I'd at least be getting sort of
in the ballpark with all of these
guesses. But the more I walked around,
man, the more it became clear that this
was going to be an absolutely gargantuan
task. 20. Okay, we're just going to say
2,000. We're just going to call it 8,000
in this whole valley. How about that?
And on top of that, I had to figure out
exactly what even counted as a tree for
this survey, which sounds silly, but
it's actually more complicated than you
might think. This was actually something
that MattPat brought up in his video
submission that I very rudely cut out
for pacing. So, let me let him explain
it to you. This might be a trick
question, any of Austin might be,
because technically speaking, trees
don't exist. The the biological
definition of a tree is just like a
label that we've arbitrarily put on
certain plant life out there. So, this
could be a trick question and the real
answer is that no trees exist in Skyrim
because the definition of tree is a
nebulous concept.
>> So, after giving it some thought, I
decided I was going to keep the rules
extremely simple. Trunk, tall, branches.
If it looks like a tree, I'm counting it
as a tree. We're using the kindergarten
definition of a tree. Got it? So, in the
end, purely based on vibes, I decided
that my first guess was going to be 41,500
41,500
trees in Skyrim. And that's just from me
walking around and eyeballing it. So,
less than half of MattPat's guess, which
obviously makes me a little bit nervous.
In fact, why don't we see what some of
our other participants guessed and then
see if that makes us feel any better.
My name is JV, and I believe that there
are 1,627
trees in the hit 2011 video game, The
Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.
Well, hello. My name is Kate. Taking an
educated guess from the amount of time
I've spent roaming that map of my entire
adult life, it feels like at this point,
Hello. Oh, that light's really bright.
I'm Hammer Guy and I think there are
45,000 trees in Skyrim. And if there
aren't, there should be. Goodbye.
>> All right, three more guesses on the
board. I'm not sure if that does make me
feel better, but I think it did. So, the
question now is, if there are too many
trees to actually count them one by one,
which there definitely is. And just
wandering around trying to guess based
on vibes isn't trustworthy. What can we
do to get a more accurate count without
cheating? You know, I'm not trying to
lose my own competition after all. Which
is why we're going to move on to our
second method of guessing, random
sampling. I know it sounds really
stupid, but according to science, if we
just randomly count trees in a bunch of
different spots across Skyrim, there's a
way that we can use math to estimate the
total number of trees in the game with a
high degree of certainty. I know I'm
skeptical, too, but apparently it's
real. Basically, how it works is we're
going to use a multi-stage random number
generator to pick a random point on our
map, and then from that random point,
we're going to walk a randomly selected
number of paces in a randomly selected
direction. Once we get to wherever that
leads us, we drop an item on the ground
to serve as a marker and then count
every single tree within 25 m of that
point. And then take that number, divide
it by the area of the circle, which is
about 1,820
m squared, which will then give us the
average number of trees per meter
squared. And then once you do that, you
do it again a whole bunch. The more
times the better. Uh 1 2 3. Certainly
five trees. Not very many, you guys. Not
very many. I mean, we could call it
three if we're being generous. I guess
between those two, we'll call it three
six. I count that 1 2 3 4. Now, just for
the math geniuses out there, I did fudge
my numbers in the explanation there just
to make it easier to follow because we
actually used paces to judge all of our
distances, like literal walking paces in
the game, but rest assured, the math
does check out. I'll leave a link down
below to the complete data set if you
want to dig through it yourself and find
all of the mistakes I made. I ended up
taking 20 of these random samples and I
noticed two really interesting things
about Skyrim while doing this part of
the survey. Firstly, the amount of
trees. The game really doesn't have that
many trees. In my head, Skyrim is this
super woodsy game where the paths are
always lined with forests full of
wolves, but in reality, take a look at
this. This is a fantastic topographical
map of Skyrim that was posted on Reddit
13 years ago by a user named Insanoflex,
who among many other fun details mapped
out all of the areas in the game that
they thought had tree coverage. It's not
perfect. There are places on this map
that look like they don't have trees,
but then if you go there in the game,
they do. But it's more than good enough
for this purpose. And it shows that only
about 35% of the playable area in the
game has tree coverage. And a lot of
that tree coverage isn't even very
dense. So that's interesting compared to
just what I thought about Skyrim in my
head. But the second interesting thing
is the tree varieties. The majority of
trees in this game are some kind of pine
tree. And there are some variations from
region to region in terms of how those
look. But maybe the most interesting
trees are these ones in the reach. The
closest real life analog to them is
something called a bristle cone pine or
some sort of other wind stunted
survivalist tree which can be found all
over the western United States. And
what's interesting is that these trees
in real life are known for being
extremely resilient to harsh climates,
poor soils, and high winds, which fits
perfectly with their in-game location of
the Reach, which is windy, dry, and
mountainous. Environmental storytelling.
So cool. Anyway, now that I have all of
my samples, how do we turn those samples
into an estimate for the total number of
trees in Skyrim? Well, all we need to do
is take the average number of trees per
square meter in our samples, which is
0.16, and then apply that number to all
of Skyrim. You know, basically what
we're saying is, hey, we looked around
and found that on average there are
00016 trees per square meter in a bunch
of different random places. So, we're
going to assume that on average that's
going to be the case across all of
Skyrim. There's just one problem. We
don't know how big Skyrim is. People
online often say that it's about 31.7
km, but that includes a whole bunch of
area that isn't actually part of the
playable game. And it's also based on
data pulled from the game's code
converted to kilometers by somebody that
we don't know that we don't trust. I'm
not saying it's wrong, but I'm just
saying we don't know that it's right.
So, the solution to this, of course, is
obvious. I had to recalculate Skyrim
size on my own using paces. So, that's
what I did. And it took some time, but
it actually wasn't super complicated. I
basically just used the grid that we
have to walk between various points,
counting the numbers of paces between
those points until I figured out that
these little squares were 221 m on each
side. Then I figured out how many of
those little squares were actually
inside the playable area of Skyrim. Did
some quick math and discovered that
Skyrim's entire playable area is
approximately 17.8
m. If you remember from above, we
estimated with our survey that there are
on average
trees per square meter in the game. So,
we just take that number, multiply it by
the total number of square meters, and
we get 28,06
trees in Skyrim. Now, this is a pretty
reasonable guess, but I'm going to add
1,500 extra trees to this number because
I know for a fact that there are some
trees out of bounds in this game, like
these ones here. And there are also some
that are inside of caves or cities,
which would not have been included in
our survey. which brings my official
second guess to 29,56
trees in Skyrim, which is a lot lower
than my eyeball guess. And I'm very
curious how it stacks up to a few more
of our guesses from our participants.
Bandoot here in a forest near Fall
Creek. And there are a lot of trees
around here. My guess is 50,000 trees.
That seems a little high. My guess is
Hi, my name's Juniper Dev and I think
that there's at least three trees in Skyrim.
Skyrim.
Uh, specifically 41,937
trees. That's my guess.
Hi, this is YouTube's Jacob Geller
guessing how many trees there are in
Skyrim. I've applied all my literary and
analytical skills to this and I'm
relatively confident the answer is 7,983
trees. Back to you, Austin.
>> All right, let's add those three to the
board. It's starting to get interesting.
So, in theory, according to mathematics,
my second guess here should have the
highest likelihood of being correct of
all the guesses here because we actually
used science to get it or whatever. But
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't feeling
a little bit nervous about it, which is
why we're going to do one more survey.
This time using the actual methods that
would be deployed if you were doing a
real field survey of a real area. And if
you were actually doing a real field
survey, you're going to want to be
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Well, I still feel the same way. So,
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anyway, thanks everyone. Let's get back
to trees. So, as of now, we've got a
good selection of guesses from me and
others, as well as one scientifically
backed estimate, which is different than
a guess over here. But there's one
important thing I left out of that first
survey that I need to explain to you now
before we can do our final survey and
reveal the winner of the $10,000 prize.
I left out something called the margin
of error. You've probably heard about
this before in the context of political
polls, but the margin of error is kind
of like a measurement of how certain we
are about our estimate. Sort of. It'll
honestly make more sense if I just show
it to you in context. So, let's just do
that. The original estimate that we got
from our survey was 28,06
trees. Since we only did 20 samples, our
margin of error is pretty high. It's
about 16,000 trees, which means that in
theory, the actual number of trees in
the game could be anywhere from 12,000
trees all the way up to a possible
44,000 trees, which sucks. Now, those
extreme ends of the scale are less
likely to be the actual number than the
ones closer to the middle, but they are
still possible. And numbers outside of
that range are also possible, but
extremely unlikely. Now, unfortunately
for some of the people on the board,
that means it's probably highly unlikely
that the number is going to be as low as
JV's guess, for example, of 1,627.
And it's also unlikely to be as high as
MattPat's guess of 83,762.
So the question for us is how can we
make that margin of error smaller so
that our guess becomes more accurate so
that we can be sure that we're going to
defeat everybody else at this
competition which of course is the most
important part in real life. If you want
to count the number of trees in an area
like let's say you want to know the
number of trees in Alaska or something
you don't just literally sample random
places in Alaska whether it's a
beautiful lake in a forest or inside of
the Anchorage airport outside of the
Humpy's Alaskan ale house and then
derive the density from that. There's no
reason to even include something like an
airport terminal in your survey cuz you
know there's going to be no trees. And
this is basically what we did for our
first sampling survey. It works, but
there are smarter ways to do it. So what
you can do is divide your whole area
into zones that you suspect are going to
have similar densities. The samples in
those smaller zones are going to be a
lot more uniform. And that's good
because it increases our confidence that
the sample is actually representing the
true density across the zone. Using the
forestry map that I showed you earlier,
we're going to divide Skyrim into four
zones to represent the four main biomes
of trees that I found in the game. In
the north, you've got the snowy pine
trees. The west has the reach pines that
we discussed earlier. The east has the
beautiful fallcoled aspens near Riftton.
And then the center has all of those big
green pine trees that we associate with
cities like Falree. What this means is
that all of the land we know is likely
empty is not going to count and
therefore those empty samples won't
disturb our data as much and thus our
confidence will increase. Um,
statistically this is way better than
the other way that we did our sampling.
Instead of our estimate having a 55%
margin of error like it did before, this
kind of stratified survey is going to
let us push that uncertainty down to a
20% margin of error without having to
take nearly as many samples as we would
using the other method, which is great.
So, the survey itself ended up going
pretty smoothly this time around. I was
a lot more prepared for the monotony,
and it was almost fun to fill in all of
my squares and watch the numbers start
to fill themselves out as we went along.
Obviously, there were some difficulties
in terms of keeping track of our
position, and I made just tons of
mathematics errors because I'm really
out of practice of doing simple math.
Someone explain to me why that would
like why do we have to do 52 squared? I
guess that's please excuse my dear aunt
Sally. Converting my paces into walking
paces. Why would it be less? it it
wouldn't be less. There's no that
doesn't make sense. But eventually, we
fixed all of that, triple checked our
data, and once I was able to look at all
of the numbers, I noticed something
really interesting. The average density
of the forests in Skyrim, even when
we're only surveying squares that we
know have trees in them is insanely low.
On average, our Skyrim forests have a
tree density of about 29 trees per acre
of land. And if you don't know, an acre
is about the size of a football field. A
real forest like say the black forest in
Germany has about 250 trees per acre on
average, which is nearly 10 times more
dense. In a way, this kind of means that
Skyrim's forests aren't really forests,
at least in terms of realism. They're a
lot closer to the density of trees you
might find in a place like Central Park
in New York. A place that's built by
humans for other humans to walk through
and hang out in while still feeling
aesthetically natury. Which is
interesting because Skyrim is a place
that's built by humans for other humans
to walk through and hang out in that's
meant to feel aesthetically natury. It's
easy to look at this and go, "See,
Bethesda doesn't make their games
realistic. They should do more research
like Kingdom Come: Deliverance." Uh, but
I actually think this is kind of
beautiful. Skyrim is just a big giant
nature park built by a bunch of people
for you. It's made for you. How neat is
that? It does make me want to do a tree
survey in Kingdom Come: Deliverance,
too, though. I think it would be really
cool to examine the differences between
those two games. And I bet that even
games like that or or Red Dead are
really not even that close to real as
well. Anyway, I've kept you in suspense
long enough. Let's hear from our final
three participants with their guesses,
and then I'll give you my final guess.
Hello, it's Jabo here, Annie Austin's
longlost cousin. And I think there's 32,420
32,420
trees in Skyrim.
>> Hi, my name is Memoria Matters. I'm 5'6
and I'll be applying for the role of Tim
Burton's Willy Wonka. Just kidding. I'm
Memoria and I think there are 50,000
trees in Skyrim.
Hello, my name is Senaki with Seven Wise
and I think that there are
Well, let's actually think about this.
Skyrim is a pretty big game. It's not as
big as you remember cuz you're cuz they
did a really good job making it feel
big, but it's still really big and it
feels like there's a lot of trees. It's
got Todd. It's made by Todd. Todd 16
times the detail. Let's go 1600. I'm
going to guess 1,600. That I don't know
if that's too low or too high, but I
feel good about that. Thank you for
having me. any Austin, anytime, any
place, anywhere. That's why they call
him any Austin. Also, he's he doesn't
have an Audi. Uh what Jakey said at the
end there, that is unconfirmed. He has
no formal education in that field
whatsoever. All right, a tough
competition indeed. Here is our full
list. $10,000 on the line. Take one last
look at the leaderboard here. Think of
your own guess. And now, let me reveal
my final guess based on the ultimate
science survey that we did. So after all
that work, we put all our numbers in the
formula. We calculated the average
densities and then we applied that to
the 35% of the map that has trees on it.
And our final best guess for how many
trees there are in Skyrim is, drum roll
please, 39,840.
In theory, out of bounds trees should be
counted in this number because they were
on the map. But let's add an additional
500 trees to account for those indoor
trees which wouldn't be part of the
survey, which will bring our official
entry onto the board to 40,340.
All right. Now, before we reveal the
actual number and decide who's going to
win, two things. One, I was kind of
bluffing. I'm not actually participating
in terms of receiving the money. Just so
you know, I had a dramatically unfair
advantage due to being a super genius. I
guess that's Please excuse my dear aunt
Sally. So, even if I'm the closest, I'm
not getting the money. It's going to go
to the guest that was the closest. And
number two, as you probably saw, we
actually do have one more person who
submitted a number for the competition.
And if I'm not mistaken, this person
also came with an extra little message
for all of you. So, why don't we play
that now? Hey, it's Todd here at
Bethesda Game Studios. Just want to give
you a shout out. Thank you for the
videos. All of us here in the studio
love them so much. What a great look at
video game worlds. And they're so
relaxing and so well done, so detailed.
Understand there was a question on
Skyrim. Matt,
>> how many trees are in Skyrim?
>> How many trees are in Skyrim? I really I
don't know. I could go look it up, of
course, but I'm going to go guesswise. 111,11.
Let's see how good good I do. And then
while you're there,
>> are there going to be more trees in The
Elder Scrolls 6 than Skyrim or less?
>> Are there going to be more trees in
Elder Scrolls 6 or less? More. Most definitely
definitely more.
more.
>> I mean, come on. Not only does Todd
Howard come in on behalf of the team at
Bethesda with an almost certainly wildly
incorrect guess of 111,11,
but he also says that The Elder Scrolls
6 will have more trees than Skyrim. I'm
sure this is obvious, but I will be
fact-checking that when the time comes.
All right, the only thing left for us to
do at this point is see who's right. In
this envelope, I have written down on a
piece of paper the exact number of trees
in Skyrim using the exact specifications
that we set forth in this survey. It was
compiled by friend of the channel,
Timon, who you may remember from when I
pressured him into making a mod for GTA
5 that fixed all of the street signage.
So, I really thought he was the perfect
person for this as well. He also gave me
the idea to turn this into a charity
video. So, shout out to him for that.
And quickly, before I open this
envelope, I know I'm dragging this out
like crazy, but it's going to be worth
it. Trust me. Uh before I reveal the
final number, I just want to say to
everybody who participated in this
video, all of these astonishingly
talented and creative and inspiring
people that I'm privileged to call
acquaintances or in some cases even
friends, thank you very much. And I
absolutely include everyone at Bethesda
Game Studios in that as well. Just like
every hardworking game developer out
there, I know there are many of you
watching. You all inspire every single
second of video that I put onto this
website. All right, lock in everybody.
Enough of the sentimentality. Okay, how
many trees are there in Skyrim? For the
record, I legitimately do not know the
answer to this. So, the moment I'm
opening it is the moment I'm finding out
as well, which means this is all
unscripted. All right. I'm nervous that
I got it completely wrong. I'll tell you what.
what.
Wow. The number of trees in Skyrim is 46,430
trees, which means that our winner is H.
Bomber Guy with a guess of 45,000 trees.
Congratulations to you. Congratulations
to the Palestinian Children's Relief
Found fund, excuse me, fund all of the
charities that were picked by the people
are going to be listed down below. They
are all fantastic charities, so you can
go look to them. And if you want to
donate on behalf of your favorite
creator, please feel free to do so. To
every single person watching this,
whether this is your first any Austin
video ever, or if you've been watching
since Eggbusters in 2013, I owe you one,
and I'll keep working to repay that in
20 minute chunks every couple of weeks
for as long as I possibly can. Like I
said, this is my last video of the year
and I'm taking a little break to catch
up on uh you know being having a life.
Uh so I will see you all in 2026 and I'm
songs something
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