I recently bought the Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition for PC (of course) and I'm having a bit of a problem. I'm over fifty hours in and just now started the "Still in the Dark" Quest (going through completing all the quests; marked and unmarked).

I know that stuff outside in the wasteland will decay and disappear after a period of time (in the case of corpses they won't disappear if they have a quest item on them). I noticed that it must have hit that time period because in the crater outside of Black Mountain only has the corpse with the Holotape on it and Nellis also has only the one corpse with the quest item. I know that both locations normally have two corpses. Although if my memory serves there was three corpses when I did this quest on the XBOX360 so long ago.

Anyway, the real question is that I want to know if it is possible to somehow reset or revert the specific exterior cells which hold these corpses in order to bring them back. I get all OCD with games like this so I really want to get these corpses to reappear in these spots so I can loot them like I did the ones in the Repconn Headquarters.

I know some will tell me that I could just use console commands to get what the corpses held but that's not the point. It's all about getting all that you can get and that includes looting these corpses and I'm sure I'm not the only guy who has the same mindset in open-world RPGs.

If there are any console commands to bring these corpses back via using their specific reference IDs to move them to me or manually refreshing the cell to reset their decay. If it's possible, let me know all the possibilities. If there isn't please tell me so I can just svck it up and burn through it. I'd also like to mention I spent just about an hour searching google for a solution with no avail so I'm going to see if anyone here knows.

Thank you.

I'm not sure I can help you with console commands since I play on xbox but I can tell you, I too was wondering what happen to the other corpses in that crater when I recently did that quest. I don't know if it has to do with your level or if they patched it but the exact same thing happen to me. You don't have any recent saves to see if it was a glitch or not?

It apparently has to do with how long it takes you to get to that quest or, more specifically, how long it takes you to enter the cell that holds the bodies. Corpses outside are subject to corpse decay (which removes the body after a certain period of time). But I also noticed that the dead prospector corpse outside the crater near Black Mountain was still there.

I'm not willing to move on with the quest until I can find any kind of solution but without console commands it doesn't seem like there is one.

it is hard to tell what the deal is. sometimes i found the other body, the one without the tag, and sometimes i don't. i can't think of any reason for this.

It is quite annoying. That's why I'm trying to see if there are any console commands to bring them back from the void.

The one in the Crater is known to sink into the ground, at which point you need PC console commands to reach it; it also occasionally gets bagged during the cleanup routine, despite being pre-placed, since it's also dead. The one at Nellis often gets blasted out of the crater during the shelling, and blasted to bits in the process, and for whatever reason those disappear completely, rather than dropping to the ground, after the shelling stops.

I'd have to check in the GECK, but there seems to be a flag of some sort that insures the ones with the tapes don't disappear; I suspect that what's happening is that those bodies are tagged as Quest items themselves, while the other half of each pair is not, but I'd need to inspect their data fields to be sure.

Interesting, it was I suspected in several circumstances. If you have these console commands I would be appreciative to hear them. If you find anything else in the G.E.C.K. I would like to hear it. I moved on from the quest but that won't stop me from traveling back to those places and getting the bodies to reappear.

If it wouldn't be too much trouble could you check to see just how many bodies appear in the crater and at Nellis? I played this on the XBOX360 at one point and I'm almost positive there were a total of three bodies in the crater. I want to get the most I can out of this play-through and looting those corpses are oddly imperative to that cause.

Two bodies each. The third pair is at Repconn HQ.

To get below the ground: enter 'tcl' in the console- this turns off clipping, so enter it again to turn it back on after you're done and back on the surface

If the body is not there: enter 'prid ' then enter 'moveto.player', this will relocate the body in question to your position. IMPORTANT: the actor will appear alive, and likely hostile, so make sure you are not underground and that clipping is enabled when you do this, or when you kill him/her the corpse will be irretrievable because it will either plummet into the void below the cell or rocket off due to a conflict between lack of clipping and the physics engine. In both cases it will be sent out of the cell, which will cause it to automatically de-spawn (anything sent out of the currently loaded cell is automatically removed by the 'cleanup' script to save memory).

NOTE: if, as it sounds, you've played several days since the problem came up, the bodies may just be gone. If neither of the above commands works, you'll need to do as in the second one while adding in 'enable' (no ' marks) after entering the id but before entering the move command. It should look like this:

prid
enable
moveto.player

in the console screen.

EDIT: RefIDs are unique to each item/actor, and can be looked up in the wiki.

I have tried searching for the reference identification for the missing bodies before I opened this thread and never found them on the wiki. I suppose I could try and look for them again.

It's a shame there isn't some simple way of refreshing/reverting a cell. Could revertworld but that would defeat the purpose of even playing through all that time in the first place. Thank you for the assistance but unfortunately most of it was stuff I had already found but was hoping for a better solution. But don't think the time you spent isn't appreciated because it's nice to see people willing to help others on a forum.