I'm messing with the console, seeing as I'm in my second playthrough of the MQ and I can allow myself to cheat a little, mostly to keep my arrow supply up by spawning more of them. However, not all commands seem to be working for me, even though I'm pretty sure I typed them correctly.
Things like TGM, COC place and player.setav skill # all work fine. But commands like player.additem ID # do not. The wikia gives as an example player.additem ff00089c 1, no brackets, no nothing. Doesn't work. I tried adding <> and "" and () and even [] but that doesn't work either, it gives me a Invalid inventory object "ff00089c" for parameter ObjectID. Compiled script not saved! error.

So I thought, maybe I should use capitals, FF00089C, but that gives me a Missing Parameter ObjectID error. I'm not quite sure what that means. For some reason player.additem F 1000 does give me 1000 gold.
SetPlayerRace ID doesn't work either, it just poofs me to the character creation menu in the same way showracemenu does..

So what's going on? Why do some codes work, and others don't? Am I simply missing something very obvious? Any help would be much appreciated because these codes do seem to work for other people (and they worked fine in Oblivion!)

Ya I am getting the same thing when I tried to move to an NPC that I found missing, then I tried moving said NPC to me and got the same error. Then thinking the NPC was dead tried to revive said NPC and got the same error... I then loaded a decently earlier save and tried moving to them and it worked...meaning it has to do with present loaded data and the data was missing from the save file... SOOO, is there anyway to load a NPC that you apparently have lost due to a corrupt save file. This bothers me as that NPC never died and after looking up online that NPC should never disappear.

I'd suggest using the UESP over the Wikia site in general. Also note that typically IDs beginning with "ff" will be reference IDs for generated/temporary NPCs and specific spawned items within the world. If the NPC has de-spawned then it is possible the reference is no longer valid. For the additem code you will typically want the base ID and not the reference ID. If you can not find a specific item code then you can search for it.

help arrow 0

That for example will return all commands, items, and other listings with "arrow" in the name or descriptor.

help "imperial armor" 4

Will return only object (quest, script, item, etc.) listings containing the phrase in quotations. Quotes must be placed around any search including words separated by spaces. What were you trying to add using "ff00089c"? Adding an item with a reference ID (as opposed to the base object ID) like that won't work.

As far as using console commands to find missing NPCs - yes I've done this plenty of times. Using the reference ID for that NPC, I type:

prid *REFERENCE ID*
moveto player

If they do not appear and I do not get an error code back, then I type:
enable
resurrect 1

That will work assuming you're using the correct reference ID and the ID is not for a generated NPC which has been cleaned up. What NPC were you trying to locate? If it is a specific one rather than something generic I could probably find it for you - or you could search on UESP.

I'm not him, and I am using uesp for the id, and it did work with an older save. But the problem is I would like to know how to deal with a missing NPC that seems to stem from a partially corrupted saved file. It refuses to recognize the ID only on the 'corrupted' save files, meaning there should be a way to fix it that isn't too difficult.

Can't even prid the NPC. it's Sylgja(refid: 000c3a46), it says "the compiled script isn't saved!" when I try to use prid. I completed the quest she gives already, and that was the last I saw the NPC.

Yes I know - but you also hadn't said anything this specific so I was answering far more generally. You could try

player.placeatme *BASE ID*

This should only be done if the original is lost though otherwise you'll have duplicates running around and being all creepy and duplicate-like. It may or may not work for a quest in progress however - I haven't had to use it for that myself. In the case of Sylgia that would be "000C3A3F" though as usual leading zeros are not necessary. You may note that this Sylgia will not have the same reference ID as the original - or at least did not when I tried this but my original was not missing.

What may have happened may not have been a corrupted save. That does not typically result in such relatively non-destructive damage to reference lists but tend to render the save unusable. She may have been killed off and her body removed permanently after cell reset. This is not supposed to happen for non-generated NPCs though; that's one of the fixes being addressed in the patch. Still a bug of course, but not quite the same as wholesale save corruption as seen in Fallout New Vegas.

Thanks, that worked.(it didn't specify to use base ID on uesp, and told to use refid in general above)

Nice to know there is a bug with NPCs dying that shouldn't.

You're right - it just says "actor ID" which is ambiguous. I'll go ahead and fix that.


That's a radiant story quest - so the NPC associated with it is not nescessarily supposed to be immortal. The bug has more to do with the improper permenant removal of their bodies - that's supposed to happen with generated actors including spawned dragons (another bug adressed in the patch) but not with pre-made npcs. They're supposed to be "disabled" instead; this is a significant difference because disabled actors still retain their reference IDs and scripts and quests pointing to them do not break. Radiant story quests are supposed to be able to check to see if the quest giver has died and hand off that responsibility to someone else. If the reference is no longer valid then this check can not be made and the quest breaks. This deletion is what is fixed in the upcoming patch and this SHOULD fix the problem with radiant quests breaking like this.

Anyone know if you can get codes for quest items if so where can you find it at.

You can't add items beginning with FF, unless you specifically know the Form IDs for the ones in your save. Let me explain.

Basically, every item, reference, NPC whatever in Bethesda games from Oblivion onwards have a Form ID. So for example, the item gold has three different things you can refer to it as:

Form ID: 00000000F
Editor ID: gold01
Name: Gold

These are what they are as far as I can remember, but it doesn't really matter regardless.

So the Form ID is what the engine internally knows the object as. So gold to the engine is "00000000F".
The Editor ID is only used in the Creation Kit. This is what developers and modders see the item as, it's also what you use in scripts. So in a script where you have "player.additem gold01", the engine translates that to "player.additem 00000000F", and adds gold.
The Name is simply what the player sees ingame, in menus and such.

In scripts you use the editor ID, but in the console you need to use the Form ID. Form IDs are hexadecimal, the first two digits indicate the load order.

00 is any object from Skyrim.esm. So any object or reference that has been made by the developers in the base game.
Every ESM or ESP that is loaded then continues to increase the first two numbers hexadecimally. So your first loaded mod will be 01, then 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, A, B, etc.
FF is a special prefix. It indicates any reference made ingame that is stored in the current save. So for example, a spawned bandit, a new enchanted weapon you've made, ash piles etc.

When you use the console, it will look first at the prefix of the Form ID, look in that ESM/ESP, and then do what you asked with that reference. If it doesn't exist, it will throw an error.

However, objects spawned ingame with the FF prefix can't be used in the console like normal, because they differ in every save. So you can't just go on a site and look for a FF object, because that won't exist on your save. That's why it doesn't work.

Sorry for the long explanation, but I hope it helps

Thanks.. it does help

Note that "moveto player" should only fail if the NPC was removed from the game entirely by some weird twist of fate (like if they died long, long ago and their corpse was cleaned up). Sometimes you can also do "enable" before the "moveto" command and it'll work. Doing "placeatme" usually has undesired results for quest NPCs.