Beginning to regret bothering with Dawnguard now. After running all over the bleedin' map to fetch Isran's pals, the quest has stuck - I arrive back at Fort Dawnguard, Isran gives his wee speech and tells me a vampire has shown up looking for me, then nothing - he just stands there on the balcony like a lemon, and there's no sign of Serana anywhere in the building. I tried going outside and waiting for 24 hours, but all that does is move Isran from the balcony to the torture room, he still doesn't advance the questline and Serana's still nowhere to be found.

Anyone have any advice?

EDIT: Tried waiting outside for ten days, no effect. Tried using setstage and setobjectivecomplete commands, no effect.

OK, further messing about; I reloaded a save prior to A New Order and redid the quest, same issue. I reloaded a save prior to starting Dawnguard and played it through again, same issue.

So I started digging in deeper with the console, and I think I may have found the problem; the game doesn't seem to think Serana exists any more. I can't use player.moveto to reach her, I can't target her and move her to me using prid/moveto player, I even tried using placeatme to see if it would work - the game always treats Serana's refID as invalid, it's as if she just disappeared after Harkon banished me outside the castle.

A New Order has definitely completed, it's at stage 200 and completion is set to 1, but nothing I do seems to be able to get Prophet to start. Could really do with some advice.

Have you any mods installed ?

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or have you all patches and unofficial ones ?

Yes, I have lots of mods installed; they're all BOSS-sorted with a few tweaks recommended by authors, with a Bashed Patch, and any appropriate compatibility patches applied. None of them directly affect the Dawnguard quest, any of the Dawnguard NPCs, or any of the Dawnguard-specific locations except for SkyRe(which hits pretty much everything in the game at some level, and I found no mention of any other SkyRe users having this issue) and Freedom of Speech(which just moves one Word Wall).

My game is patched up, and I have all the Unofficial Patches other than Hearthfire(since I'm not using that DLC on this character).

I saw the cutscene, it played out in-full, and the quest-complete blurb came up on the screen with its wee drumroll sound. I confirmed the quest was complete using the console.

I cannot speak to everyone, because as I said, the problem is that Serana is not present. I searched the entire castle, and the entire area outside the castle. i did so again after waiting for ten ingame days. Serana never appears, Isran never has an argument with her, he just stands there on the balcony or, if I wait outside for more than 24 hours, in his room.

I have done everything I can think of, I even went on a fast travel tour around the map and slept in several inns. Nothing seems to work, Serana just never appears.

Attempting to force the quest to start via the console doesn't work either - it generates no errors, but after putting in "setstage DLC1VQ03Hunter "(and I tried it with stages 0, 1, 5, and 7), using showquesttargets doesn't have either A New Order or Prophet listed, and no Dawnguard quests appear in the quest log.

Have you tried to bring Serana back first ???

prid " serana id " then type: moveto player

note: to find serana id type: help serana 4

I did mention in post 2 that I've already tried that, and that the game throws up an invalid id error when I use any command in combination with Serana's refID. I tried it using both the code listed on the elder scrolls wiki, and on the one that appears ingame when I use the help command.

Right, on the eighth consecutive attempt, the game stopped objecting to me trying to summon Serana with console commands, and I finally managed to get her to spawn into the torture room in Fort Dawnguard.

Which she promptly walks out of, right past Isran, down the stairs, out the front door, and off again. She won't talk to me, Isran has no new speech options, no scripted scene plays between them.

I am still unable to force the start of Prophet, no matter which quest stage I attempt to set, using getstage always results in "0.00". Using setobjectivecompleted has no effect either.

Now that the move commands are working, I used player.moveto to go to Serana, and she's still in the main hall of Castle Volkihar, so now I'm not even sure if the problem is with Isran or if he's only borked because Serana is borked and never makes her way to Fort Dawnguard as she should. I tried player.moveto again after fast travelling around, sleeping in an inn, and waiting for two ingame weeks; she's still in Castle Volkihar, so it wasn't that she was just taking her time to travel.

I'm really at the end of my rope now, can anyone think of any fixes I could try?