Remember treasure foxes in Skyrim? Now we have legendary loot rats to follow in Diablo 4

Diablo 4 has seen some odd stuff cropping up from players - the recent fuss around the 'secret cow level' springs to mind - and now there's another outlandish theory about the game revolving around rats.

This one is simple - follow the rats, and they'll lead you to the good loot. We kid you not.

As PC Gamer reports, one player planted this seed of an idea, and there's been a huge flurry of chatter online about it since.

That player is Zerger45, who posted on Reddit: "Okay this is going to sound really bizarre, but you need to follow the rats for good loot. Don't follow the predetermined path in any dungeon, instead, just follow the rats."

"The rats smell the cheese! I'm telling you it's real and I feel like I'm crazy but I found multiple legendaries doing this within a span of maybe 10 minutes. The rats will tell you which pack of enemies to kill, and then they wander towards where you need to go! It's real I'm not crazy!"

So, does it work? No. Not a bit of it. There you go, end of story.

Well, it's not quite that simple (is it ever?) as some folks claim that they've followed the rats and found plenty of the good stuff. There's been a great deal of debate on this, and as another player (on Blizzard's forums) makes clear, the theory is that you can think of the rats as having 'loot auras' that improve the quality of the goodies on the monsters in their radius.

There's a rat in my dungeon, what am I gonna do?

There's a common theme here, and that's however skeptical you are about this reverse Pied Piper idea, you can't resist trying it. Just to, you know, see if there might be anything in it. Sure, it's crazy, but hey, you might just hit legendary paydirt, and that lure - combined with natural human curiosity - is just too much to bear.

You're firing up Diablo 4 already, aren't you? Well, we can't blame you. Just don't come crying to us when you come away disappointed and disillusioned, okay? (And yes, we're firing it up too).

In all seriousness, this episode may prompt you to remember that way back when, there was a popular Skyrim myth that foxes led you to areas with treasure. In the end, as confirmed by the devs of that RPG, this turned out to be true - sort of.

While foxes weren't coded to do this as such, the way in which they were programmed to move (when fleeing from and evading the player) meant they were more likely to head towards certain areas - points of interest (like ruins) that were likely to contain treasure.

So, who knows - maybe the rat fans are onto something, and there is some weird underlying unintentional game mechanic at work here. Or maybe not, certainly if the above YouTube clip courtesy of ActinTuffGaming, which researches the theory via a two-hour rat-chasing session, is anything to go by.

ActinTuffGaming found just the one piece of legendary loot in their rat-trailing travels, and noted that this was something discovered along the way they had to go anyway, without following a rat (although a rat was near the monster, it didn't lead the player there). That doesn't actually dispel the 'loot aura' theory as such, mind, so...

Maybe the Diablo 4 devs will step in to fully rule out any rat-related treasure hunting theories in the near future.