Skyrim SE/AE troubleshooting: Console commands and misc. mods misbehaving (2)

Like the first post in the series, this is mostly for my own reference — a collection of console commands that fix various Skyrim bugs and unwanted NPC behaviors.

Whiterun textures are blurry after fast travel

This is a bug that has been happening intermittently for as long as I’ve been playing Skyrim: when fast-traveling to Whiterun and Whiterun only, whether by minimap or through the Legacy of the Dragonborn teleporter, textures appeared stretched and blurry, like this:

I found about a dozen Reddit and Steam posts advising to load a previous save or to save and restart the game. And, yeah, that fixed it, but it was an immersion-breaking pain in the ass. Until I found, buried in a random thread on Reddit that I cannot for the life of me dig up again, this suggestion:

1. Go into an interior cell (Breezome works).
2. Open the console.
3. Run pcb.

Problem solved.

pcb, if anyone’s wondering, stands for Purge Cell Buffer. The stretched textures issue doesn’t seem to be unique to Skyrim, according to this thread. You’d think Bethesda would get their shit together and fix their game engine by now.

A Skyrim NPC that’s essential for a modded quest keeps dying!

I’ve had Captain Aldis die on me about twenty different times to dragon attacks in Solitude before I could get Val Serano to bring the Star of Solitude to him, and I was fucking done. The tip below is courtesy of Skyrim Commands.

To make an NPC essential (so they stop friggin’ dying), select them, open the console, and:

1. Click the NPC. You’ll see something like ‘ ‘ RefID: (xxxxxxxx) | BaseID: (xxxxxxxx).
2. Note the BaseID value. That’s the one you want for this command.
3. In the console, type setessential BaseIDValue 1.

For example, if you want to make Captain Aldis essential, you need to use the following command:

setessential 00041FB8 1

The opposite works too, of course. If you’re sick of Maven Black-Briar and confident it won’t break your save (you finished the Thieves Guild questline and sided with the Stormcloaks in the Civil War), you can make Maven killable by running:

setessential 0002446a 0

Have fun with your killing spree (and remember to back up your save).

I don’t know where to teleport in Skyrim D:

Teleporting can get you out of sticky situations, like your character glitching in an interior world space or custom dungeons not having a quick way back to where you came from.

The command to teleport is coc cell_name, and a complete list of cell names can be found here. Just Ctrl + F, look for the place you want to go, and enjoy.

A Skyrim NPC is bugged or glitched

Maybe one of your followers is stuck in a crouch because you entered combat while sneaking. Maybe an NPC had a pathing error and won’t trigger a scripted scene (like Viarmo refusing to recite the Poetic Edda to Elisif, or Ezra not starting the dialogue with Argus Fenneric in Legacy of the Dragonborn). Or maybe an NPC simply glitched and refuses to talk to you, and all you get is, “This person is busy”.

The simplest fix for any of these scenarios is to soft-reset that character by disabling and re-enabling them. To do this:

1. Open the console.
2. Click the NPC.
3. Type disable and press Enter. This will make the NPC disappear.
4. Type enable and press Enter. The NPC will not reappear until you exit the console, so don’t panic.

Don’t do anything in between steps 3 and 4 (like clicking something else, exiting the console, etc.)

Skyrim wolves don’t attack me

This one drove me crazy. There’s dozens (hundreds?) of Google hits for this, and none of them fixed my friggin’ problem. A lot of them blamed the Unofficial Skyrim SE Patch, but my other MO2 instance — which ran USSEP and about 900 mods besides — didn’t have this problem, so it couldn’t be that. (Okay, I know we don’t like Arthmoor, but c’mon.)

The culprit?

Not USSEP. Not DAR/OAR or FNIS. Not some XPMSE32 bug, either.

What broke the wolves (and frostbite spiders, and a bunch of other wildlife creatures besides) was a mod called aTweaks and Utilities. Once I disabled it, the wolves happily went back to trying to murder me, and all was right with Tamriel. It only took me two friggin’ hours to figure it out.

What’s interesting is that this was listed as a hard requirement for the new RoleRim standing stones mod, which is really new at the time of writing this. There is a recent bug pointing to an incompatibility between aTU and another mod called Weapon Speed Mult Fix, but that one wasn’t in my load order at all.

Anyway, I’m not getting paid to fix other people’s mods for them, so I’m just logging this here in case anyone else has problems with wolves/spiders/wildlife not attacking them and it’s not because of USSEP.

I can’t take screenshots in Skyrim

Do you use ENB? Are you trying to use the PrintScreen key? ENB may have changed your default screenshot button to something else.

To check if that’s the case:

1. Go to your Skyrim installation folder. By default, this is C:\ProgramFiles\Steam\SteamApps\Common\Skyrim\.
   Note: If you’re on a 60-bit operating system, look under Program Files (x86) instead.
2. Open enblocal.ini.
3. Under [ INPUT ], check the value for KeyScreenshot. The code for the PrintScreen key is 44. If the value is anything other than that, check the ENBlocal.ini input reference documentation to understand what it is, or change it back to 44.

H/T to user Avrie on Steam for this one.