Even a fantasy game like Skyrim won't let me be a trillionaire

The news that Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire made me wonder whether any videogame lets you amass that kind of wealth. I booted up Skyrim and tried a cheat: I typed the console command player.additem 0000000f 1000000000000, carefully counting the zeros as I went.

Instead of a trillion gold, my character lost 2,147,483,647 gold. To check, I ran to The Bee and Barb in Riften and tried to buy a bottle of Alto Wine for 19 gold from Keerava. The result was the same when I loaded another character.

The reason turned out to be technical: Skyrim stores gold as a 32-bit signed integer, which tops out at 2,147,483,647 (one bit for sign, 31 bits for value). Going past that limit flips the number from positive to negative, so a trillion simply won’t stick.

So even in a world with dragons, vampires, and shoutable weather, you can't become a trillionaire in Skyrim. I wish our own world made that much sense.

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