Skyrim SE/AE troubleshooting: console commands (1)

Modding Skyrim is a finicky beast at the best of times; despite my best efforts and considerable experience (I’ve been doing this a while), the game still breaks. Luckily, unlike that time I had to nuke a level 55 save because Kaidan 2: Immersive Edition was annoying as fuck, most of these bugs are fixable.

Side note: If you’re considering getting Kaidan 2: Immersive Edition and romancing him, just… don’t. Unless you’re happy to run around with a fratboy who constantly, and I mean constantly, talks about your Dragonborn’s arse.

This page contains a collection of console commands and fixes I found during my last playthrough, which spans about 1500 mods and about four months of play. If it helps anyone, great! I’ll be sure to add my ko-fi when I get one (never). I know I’ll be referring back to it so.

I’ve only tested the commands below on PC. They might work on consoles. Up to you guys to try. #pcmasterrace

_{Please excuse the SEO keyword spam.}

How to open the Skyrim console and select something

Whatever version of the game you’re running (LE, SE or AE), press the tilde (~) key to open the console. Don’t ask me why it’s called a “tilde” when “squiggly line” was right there.

To select something (an object, an NPC, whatever), click it. You’ll see something like this in the center of the screen:

'' RefID: (114dcd7b) | BaseID: (0001384f)

If you select something, any console commands you type will affect the thing you selected. If you don’t, some will default to affecting your player character (you), and others won’t do anything.

Skyrim character stuck in terrain

This one happens to me more often than I care to admit; I’ll try and fail to spiderman up a sheer cliff face for an hour before I look for a road. Cue Skyrim spider-horse meme.

Open the console, make sure nothing is selected, and type:

tcl

tcl turns off collision or, in other words, lets your character move through solid objects and terrain. Use the mouse, Space and WASD keys to get out of whatever crevice you fell into.

Bonus: TCL also helps you skip jump puzzles you don’t feel like dealing with, because having jump puzzles in a game with terrible jump and camera controls is a really bad idea (looking at you, DAc0da).

Skyrim character can’t move (controls frozen)

If your character move controls are completely disabled (at the end of a buggy cutscene, say), open the console and type:

enableplayercontrols

I ran into this bug randomly when my character froze during a dream cutscene — I believe it’s tied to Vigilant, but I haven’t played through that one yet — and I couldn’t move forward to complete the objective that would set me free.

H/T to smoky mcpot on Steam for the tip.

Skyrim NPC won’t stop attacking me

Friendly fire is a PITA in Skyrim. I’ve aggroed my fair share of NPCs with an ill-timed fireball or AoE. Rather than put them down as they deserved (*cough* Yamarz *cough*), I found a console command that instantly stops NPC combat.

Open the console, click the NPC to target it, then type:

stopcombat

Easy, right? Not when you have a follower that’s also in combat now and really wants to kill the offending NPC.

Sometimes, targeting both the NPC and the follower and running stopcombat for both works. Other times, though, the only way to fix it was to load an earlier save and autosave and either play through the same section again (annoying) or dismiss the follower and play through the same section again (annoying but necessary if the friendly fire comes from them).

One particularly stubborn instance of this bug happened during the Taste of Death quest, where Eola started attacking me for absolutely no reason. This one had a more involved solution (H/T to Reddit user sherlockpotter7, still helping 10 years later despite their questionable taste in media and entertaining).

Bonus: If Auri keeps attacking you, it’s probably because she’s mad you gave her arrows with wood in them. As a Wood Elf, she only uses Bone Arrows, which you can buy from the Drunken Huntsman in Whiterun or console-command into your inventory. stopcombat works on Auri, too.

Skyrim follower disappeared

I run lots of custom followers (Kaidan, Vilja, Auri, Remiel, Khajit Will Follow, Gore, to name just a few). I also play through lots of mods who may or may not be follower-friendly. I’ve seen followers get stuck in terrain, refuse to spawn when zoning in, automatically un-summon themselves, or pop up randomly despite supposedly chilling at my Legacy of the Dragonborn safe house). There’s fixes for pretty much all of these scenarios.

The most obvious fix is to use the follower’s summon spell. Some followers will let themselves be summoned whether or not they’re your active follower. Others, however, won’t (e.g. Bjorn or the KWF crew), and some are buggy ay eff (Yazakh, my girl, I love you but you need to get your sh!t together).

If that doesn’t work, the next best thing is to get the follower’s RefID, then teleport them to you.

Get a Skyrim follower’s RefID

There’s a couple simple ways to do this, and a not-so-simple way.

The simplest way is to open a previous save, click the follower and note down the RefID parameter. The other easy way to get the follower’s RefID is to google and pray (hint: restrict your search to Reddit with site:reddit.com for best results).

If you can’t do either of these, you can also generate a file with every ID in your current save (yep), then look for the RefID of the follower you want.

If your follower is vanilla rather than modded, you can also consult a list like this one.

Let’s say all of this failed, though. To generate the file I was talking about, open the console and type:

save funclist 1

Your game will freeze for a few minutes. Don’t panic.

Once this command finishes running, Skyrim will minimize and the generated funclist.ess.txt file will automatically open in Notepad. This file is huge; your Notepad might also freeze or be sluggish at first. Be patient.

In the funclist file, press Ctrl+F and look for ACHRs:, which should take you to a section similar to the one below.

Click anywhere in the line that says ACHRs:, then Ctrl+F again and look for the name of the NPC or follower you want. Let’s say you lost Kaidan. Press Ctrl+F and look for his name. You’ll land in a row with some numbers at the start, then “Kaidan”, then some flags and parameters.

What you want from this row is the first value. In the screenshot above, it’s 4E002F9C, but your Kaidan’s RefID will be different based on where the Kaidan mod is in your load order.

Teleport the follower to you

Now that you’ve got your RefID, you only need to run two additional console commands:

prid RefID
moveto player

So, if you wanted to move Kaidan to you (let’s say his summon spell borked or you don’t have it), you’d do:

prid 4E002F9C
moveto player

prid is short for Pick Reference by ID, in case you’re wondering.

Can’t sleep in an owned bed in Skyrim

When playing with the Creation Kit Survival Mode enabled (or custom needs mods, though those are notoriously buggy these days), you need to sleep so you don’t suffer penalties to your magicka and magicka regen. But if you’re in a mod like Project AHO that simply doesn’t have any beds for the player to sleep in, you’re sh!t outta luck.

Enter the setownership command.

To sleep in an owned bed, open the console, click it to target it, and type:

setownership

This will remove the ownership from any bed, bedroll etc. so you can sleep in it. H/T to this unnamed Reddit user for the tip.

Note: After you run this command, move your mouse cursor away from the bed, then move it back to see your changes.

You got lost in Skyrim

Let’s say you’re in an interior cell. You can’t fast-travel out of it, and you also don’t know how the heck to get back (Beyond Skyrim: Bruma has some interesting design choices in some of its dungeons which makes it harder than it needs to be to get the heck out of there).

You can teleport to another location of your choosing using the coc console command:

coc cellname

cellname is the name of the cell you want to teleport to. For vanilla Skyrim, you can get a list of locations from a list like this one (H/T to Steam user sudokek and their unnamed collaborator).