Console

Skyrim’s console is a built-in command line for poking at the game directly: teleporting around, spawning items, fixing a stuck quest, setting up a screenshot, or just cheating shamelessly. It’s a debug tool the developers left switched on, and it’s enormously handy once you know your way around it.

For years it was awkward to reach in VR, because typing was the whole problem. That’s changed.

Opening it in VR

On a desktop you open the console with the ` key (the tilde/grave key, above Tab). The trouble in VR is obvious: with a headset on, you can’t see the keyboard you’re supposed to type into, and hardware keyboards don’t work in-game anyway.

The fix is the on-screen keyboard in OpenComposite Unleashed. Bring it up (by default, Double-Click Left stick), open the console with the on-screen `, and type your command with the pointer, all without leaving VR or reaching for a real keyboard. Squeeze Grip to dismiss the keyboard when you’re done.

How it works

A few ideas cover most of what you’ll do:

• Global vs. targeted commands. Some commands act on the world at large (coc whiterun) or on you. Others act on a specific thing you’ve targeted first.
• player. for yourself. Prefix a command with player. to run it on your own character, e.g. player.setav carryweight 500. This needs no target, which makes it the easiest way to use the console in VR.
• help finds base IDs. Run help "thing" 0 to search the game for anything matching (items, spells, perks, NPCs) and print its IDs. Commands and IDs aren’t case-sensitive, and leading zeros are optional.

Targeting without a mouse

On a desktop you target something by clicking it with the console open, which selects it and shows its reference ID at the top of the screen. VR has no cursor for that, so:

• Prefer commands that need no target. player. commands act on you, and plenty of others are global (coc, help, setstage, tgm). Most of what you’ll want lives here.
• To target a specific reference, use prid. prid <refID> selects a reference by its ID, no clicking required. Then run your targeted command (kill, resurrect, moveto player, and the like).

The snag is getting that <refID>, which is where it stops being straightforward.

Finding a reference ID

Two kinds of ID turn up, and it’s easy to grab the wrong one:

• A base ID identifies a kind of thing (the “Lydia” character template, say). This is what help gives you.
• A reference ID (refID) identifies one specific, placed instance out in the world. That’s what prid and most targeted commands actually want.

For a unique, named NPC (a follower, a jarl, a quest-giver), the refID is fixed, and the easiest place to find it is the UESP wiki , which lists a RefID on each NPC’s page.

For anything else (or when you’d rather not comb a wiki), let the game hand you the IDs. save <name> 1 writes a normal save and a plain-text copy of it beside your saves in Documents\My Games\Skyrim VR\Saves, named <name>.ess.txt. Open that in a text editor and search it by name for the reference IDs your save is currently tracking. The dump takes a moment to write (the game may hang while it does), but it needs no mouse, which makes it the most practical way to run down a refID in VR.

A truly generic actor (a nameless bandit) still won’t leave a name worth searching for, so for those you’re back to player. and global commands.

A few cautions

The console is powerful in the way a chainsaw is powerful.

• Nudge quests, don’t shove them. setstage can push a stuck quest forward, but skipping too far can leave scripted content unrun. Advance one stage at a time and check. And never run caqs on a save you care about; it completes every quest in the game at once.
• A couple of commands behave oddly in VR. Free camera (tfc) still follows your head, and field-of-view (fov) is governed by your headset, so those don’t do what they do on a flat screen. They’re noted in the list where it matters.

When you’re ready, here’s the Console Commands reference: a filterable, categorized list of the commands worth knowing and what each one does.