One of the internet's top experts on Skyrim minutiae hosted a $10,000 charity competition to guess how many trees there are in the Bethesda classic

An orc stares blankly at an open book, realising his mistake, in Skyrim. — (Image credit: Bethesda)

YouTuber AnyAustin's playful, yet exacting style of videogame investigation has really taken off in the past year, garnering well over a million views per video. Whether he's investigating the hydrology of The Elder Scrolls or taking Grand Theft Auto to task for its lax standards of airport realism, you're in for a good time, and I've found the videos an inspiration to slow down and smell the roses more when I game.

AnyAustin closed the year with a bang: A characteristically whimsical investigation of how many trees there are in the entirety of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, but with a twist. He recruited 10 internet gaming personalities and one secret VIP guest to submit their own arboreal estimations, with the winner earning a $10,000 donation to the charity of their choice. For AnyAustin's own process, he attempted three different estimations in increasing order of rigor:

How Many Trees Are There in Skyrim? - YouTube

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Vibes-based, walking around, counting trees in a few spots and going "eh, seems right:" 41,500.
Random sampling across the world map, with locations determined by a random number generator and the average multiplied by Skyrim's overall area: 29,506.
Sampling limited to Skyrim's forested areas and averaged zone-by-zone, inspired by real world forestry practices: 40,340

My own guesses while watching were a moonshot of 200,000, adjusted down to 50K as I became better educated over the course of the video. As for the final answer, well, it feels a bit joyless and unsporting to spoil that here, doesn't it? Ditto for the "special guest," who wrung a gleeful chortle out of me when they appeared onscreen.

One thing I will say I found interesting about the total is that AnyAustin's first, most from-the-hip guess was the closest. Your fancy mathematics and forestry corpus just can't beat a good old fashioned gut check⁠—at least in the magical land of Tamriel.

If you have a gun to your head and your assailant is demanding to know the exact number of trees in Skyrim and who the special guest was, you can witness the latter at the 21:00 mark of the video, and the former two minutes after that. Here's the full list of charities that were up for that $10K, if the spirit of the season is moving you to philanthropy:

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Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch. You can follow Ted on Bluesky.

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