The information that Elon Musk has grow to be the world’s first trillionaire, which looks like one thing the world positively would not want, received me pondering: have I ever even performed a videogame that allow me be a trillionaire? I’ve positively racked up hundreds of thousands of {dollars} or cash or different make-believe forex in a number of video games… however trillions?
I actually could not consider any recreation I’ve performed that allow me accumulate that form of unfathomable wealth. Heck, the one recreation I can consider off the highest of my head that even dealt in billions is Balatro, the place my excessive rating is a mere 48 billion—however that is chips, not {dollars}.
While I used to be pondering this, I booted up Skyrim to see if it was even potential to offer myself one trillion {dollars}. And would not you recognize it? The fantasy world of Skyrim, which incorporates historic dragons, evil necromancers, steam-powered robots, lizard-people, elves, and werewolves—would not enable trillionaires.
Inspired by most of the actual world’s richest males, I wasn’t about to earn my trillions in Skyrim: I used to be simply going to make use of a cheat and add it to my account as if it have been an inheritance or a mortgage from daddy. I used a basic Skyrim console command many of us know by heart: player.additem.
I typed player.additem 0000000f (that’s the item code for gold, also memorized), then added a 1, then carefully counted out the correct number of zeroes. It took a while!
1,000: thousand
1,000,000: million
1,000,000,000: billion
1,000,000,000,000: trillion!
That’s a lot of zeroes, innit? Probably more than any one person should have, huh?
But I did it. I typed player.additem 0000000f 1000000000000.
I didn’t become a trillionaire. Instead I lost 2,147,483,647 gold. Da hell?
That didn’t sound right. Maybe a trillion gold simply couldn’t be displayed in my wallet? Skyrim came out back in 2011, a blissful time when probably no one even considered that a trillionaire might someday exist. So I ran into the nearest shop (The Bee and Barb in Riften) and tried to buy a single bottle of Alto Wine for 19 gold from Keerava.
Nope. No mistake. Giving myself a trillion dollars had put me over 2 billion dollars in debt. I loaded up another character and tried it again. Same result.
I googled a bit, confused as to why some people are allowed to have a trillion dollars and some are not. Smarter people than me already know: in Skyrim, gold is a 32-bit signed integer, which means its max value is 2,147,483,647 (1 bit is used for positive/negative, the other 31 for the value). Apparently, if you go over that value by a few hundred billion, or maybe even just one, the number flops from positive to negative.
So there you have it! Even in a fantasy world where you can become a vampire and cat-people exist and you can change the weather by yelling at it, you can’t be a trillionaire. I wish our own world made that much sense.