The Witcher 3’s secret cows guardian is still surprising players 11 years later

Many moons ago, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt had an early-game exploit to make bucket loads of cash very quickly. All you had to do was kill some cows and sell their hides, meditate to respawn said cows, and repeat the process.

CD Projekt Red, the team behind The Witcher 3, came up with an ingenious method to fix this get-rich-quick scheme way back in patch 1.05, in June 2015. Killing six cows now spawns a level 27 chort, an enemy far superior to the player’s expected level.

Essentially, these very specific cows — the ones in White Orchard, the game’s starting area — had an incredibly powerful guardian. And despite this secret foe being 11 years old, players are still surprised by it.

Ironically, the fix enabled a stronger exploit than what it set out to fix, because if the player managed to kill the chort, another one would spawn in its place. Do you see where this is going? Killing the chorts on repeat had a much higher profit margin than slaying the cows.

Of course, it was only beneficial for higher-level players who returned to the area later down the line, but this was eventually also patched so that only one chort spawns, and for another to take its place, Geralt must leave White Orchard and return.

The Witcher 3 is my favorite game of all time. I don’t often replay games, but I’ve completed Wild Hunt multiple times, and I even have a Geralt of Rivia tattoo. That said, until today, I’d never heard of the aptly named “Bovine Defense Force,” so it’s no wonder other players haven’t either. I’m also scarred after killing the Skyrim chicken early on, though, to the point where I avoid slaying non-hostile creatures in RPGs as much as possible, so I wasn’t the target audience for the chort’s fury in the first place.