Skyrim Console Commands

Press the grave or tilde key — the one immediately left of the number 1 and below Escape. On a UK layout it is often the key left of Z instead, and on several European layouts it is a different key again, which is the usual reason "the console will not open" for people outside the US.

The game pauses while the console is open. Type a command and press Enter; commands are not case sensitive, so tgm and TGM are the same thing. Press the same key again to close it.

Many commands act on a target rather than on you. Clicking an object or NPC while the console is open selects it and prints its reference ID at the top of the screen, and commands like unlock, kill and resurrect then apply to that selection. Commands prefixed with player. always apply to you regardless of what is selected.

This page lists two IDs and no more, on purpose. Gold is 0000000F and lockpicks are 0000000A. Everything else you should look up in your own game, and there is a command for it.

help "iron sword" 4 searches the loaded game data and prints every matching item with its ID. The trailing 4 restricts the results to items; without it you also get quests, NPCs and perks, which is useful when you want those and noise when you do not. Page through long results with the Page Up and Page Down keys.

The reason to look them up rather than copy them from a list is that IDs are not fixed across installations. Anything added by a DLC or a mod carries a load-order prefix in the first two characters, so the same item has a different ID on a different setup. A hard-coded list of a hundred IDs is right for a vanilla install and wrong for a modded one, and there is no way to tell which you are reading.

The other route is the developer test room. coc qasmoke teleports you to a small room full of boxes containing one of every item in the game. Take what you want and leave with another coc command rather than the door, which does not lead anywhere sensible.

The widely repeated claim that console commands disable Skyrim achievements is not true on PC. It has been tested repeatedly — achievements including the ones tied to gold totals still unlock after using additem. Some editions display a warning to the contrary; the warning is wrong.

What does disable achievements is installing mods, and no console command turns them back on. That distinction is worth keeping straight, because the two get conflated constantly.

The real risk is not achievements but quest state. Commands that complete or advance quests, or that kill or move NPCs the game still needs, can leave a quest permanently unfinishable. setstage in particular is a good way to break a quest chain quietly, with the damage only appearing hours later. Save to a separate slot before using anything that touches quests, and prefer advskill over setting a skill directly because it grants the perk points that come with the level.