Look, the Commonwealth is a miserable place. Between the radioactive rain, those twitchy feral ghouls in the Super Duper Mart, and Preston Garvey constantly pestering you about another settlement that needs your help, sometimes you just want to break the game. You want to be a god. Honestly, Bethesda basically expects you to do it. That’s why the console exists.
Fallout 4 cheat codes aren't just about laziness; they are a fundamental part of the sandbox experience on PC. If you've played through the story three times and just want to build a massive, gravity-defying fortress at Starlight Drive-In without spending forty hours scavenging for ceramic and copper, you're going to use them. Everyone does.
Getting started is simple, but it’s amazing how many people trip up on the basics. You hit the tilde key (~), which is usually right under the Escape key. If you're using a non-US keyboard, it might be the apostrophe or the grave accent key. Once that little translucent box pops up at the bottom of the screen, the game pauses, and you’re basically the architect of the Matrix.
Just a heads up: using these will disable Steam achievements for that session. If you care about your digital trophies, you'll need to restart the game after you're done playing around with the fabric of reality. Or, you know, find a mod on Nexus that enables achievements while using mods and cheats. People have thought of everything.
The Essentials for Surviving the Wasteland
Most players start with the big ones. You know the ones. tgm. Toggle God Mode. It’s the classic. You get infinite health, infinite ammo, and—most importantly—infinite carry weight. You can sprint across the glowing sea carrying six hundred desktop fans and three dozen heavy machine guns without breaking a sweat. It feels cheap, sure, but after your tenth death to a legendary Bloatfly, it starts looking pretty tempting.
If you don't want to be completely invincible but you're tired of walking at a snail's pace because you picked up too many desk lamps, use player.setav carryweight [number]. Setting that to something like 5000 lets you actually play the game as a looter-shooter without the constant inventory management simulator.
Then there’s tcl. Toggle Clipping. This is the ultimate "I'm stuck in the geometry" fix. Bethesda games are famous for their... let’s call them "features." Sometimes you jump behind a crate and find yourself wedged into a corner you can't get out of. Type tcl, fly out of the wall, and go back to your business. It’s also great for settlement building when the snapping tool refuses to put a wall where you actually want it.
Manipulating Your Stats and Perks
Maybe you don't want to break the physics, you just want to be smarter. Or stronger. Or more charismatic so you can actually convince people not to shoot you on sight. You can manually adjust your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats using player.setav [stat] [value]. If you want to be a genius, player.setav intelligence 10 does the trick.
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But perks are where it gets tricky. You can’t just "set" a perk. You have to add it. This requires the player.addperk [perk ID] command. This is where most people get frustrated because the IDs aren't just "StrongBack." No, they’re hex codes. For example, if you want the first rank of the Medic perk, the ID is 0004c924. It’s a bit of a hassle to look them all up, but if you’re trying to build a specific character build without the 50-hour grind, it’s the only way to go.
Fallout 4 Cheat Codes for the Ultimate Hoarder
Let's talk about the economy. Caps are hard to come by early on. player.additem 0000000f [amount] is the magic spell for infinite wealth. The "f" at the end is all you need—the leading zeros are technically optional, but most veterans type them out of habit.
Crafting is arguably the most addictive part of the game, but finding rare materials is a nightmare. Instead of hunting for "Shipment of Adhesive" from every vendor in Diamond City, you can just spawn the materials directly into your inventory. Here are the ones you’ll actually use:
- Wood:
000731a3 - Steel:
000731a4 - Adhesive:
001bf72e(The most valuable substance in the post-apocalypse) - Aluminum:
0006907a - Circuitry:
0006907b - Fiber Optics:
0006907g— wait, actually it’s0006907d. See? Even the IDs get confusing.
One of the coolest commands that people often overlook is player.placeatme [object ID]. This doesn't put an item in your bag; it drops it right in front of you. Want to fight three Deathclaws at once in the middle of Sanctuary? Use 0001db4c. It’s chaos. It’s fun. It’s why we play on PC.
Changing the World Around You
The environment in the Commonwealth is static, mostly. But you can mess with it. set scale [number] is hilarious. Click on an NPC—like Marcy Long, because everyone wants to mess with her—and type set scale 0.5. Now she’s a tiny, angry person. Set it to 5 and she’s a giant towering over the walls.
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You can also change the time of day. set time-scale to [number] controls how fast the sun moves. The default is 20. If you set it to 1, time passes at the same rate as the real world. If you set it to 1000, days flash by in seconds. It’s a great way to see the lighting engine at work, though it can occasionally break certain scripted quests if you let time fly too fast during a dialogue sequence.
Dealing with Quest Glitches
We have to talk about the "B-word." Bugs. Sometimes a quest just... stops. The NPC won't talk to you, the door won't open, or the objective marker points to a corpse that doesn't have the item you need. This is where Fallout 4 cheat codes become literal lifesavers.
The sqt (Show Quest Targets) command is your diagnostic tool. It gives you the internal name of your active quests. Once you have that, you can use getstage [QuestID] to see where the game thinks you are. If you’re stuck, setstage [QuestID] [StageNumber] can force the game to move to the next part of the story.
Be careful here. Force-skipping quest stages is the fastest way to break your save file permanently. Always, and I mean always, make a hard save before you start messing with quest logic. If you skip a stage that was supposed to spawn a specific item or trigger a specific flag for a later quest, you might find yourself 20 hours later unable to finish the main story.
The Mystery of the "RefID" vs "BaseID"
This is the part that confuses everyone. Every item in the game has two identities. The BaseID is the template for the item—like "all 10mm pistols." The RefID is the specific instance of that item currently in the world—like "that 10mm pistol sitting on that specific table."
When you use player.additem, you use the BaseID. When you want to move a specific NPC to you, you use their RefID. For example, if you lost Nick Valentine (he has a habit of wandering off), you don't want to spawn a new Nick. You want the real Nick. You’d type prid 00002f25 to select him, then moveto player to bring him to your side. If you use player.placeatme, you’ll end up with a clone who doesn't know who you are and has no inventory. It’s creepy. Don't do it.
Why Some Cheats Don't Work on Consoles
It’s a common point of frustration: "Where is the console on PS5 or Xbox?"
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The short answer is: there isn't one. Sony and Microsoft are very protective of their operating systems. They don't want users having access to a command line that could potentially crash the system or bypass store restrictions.
However, Fallout 4 was one of the first games to bring "Mods" to consoles. If you're on Xbox or PlayStation, your version of Fallout 4 cheat codes is the "Cheat Room" mod or similar "Cheat Terminal" downloads. These mods basically wrap the console commands into a usable in-game interface. You get a holotape that lets you toggle god mode, add caps, or spawn items through a menu. It’s actually more user-friendly than the PC console, though slightly less powerful.
Advanced Camera Tricks for Photographers
If you're one of those people who spends more time taking screenshots of the sunset over the ruins of Boston than actually shooting raiders, you need tfc. Toggle Free Camera.
This detaches the camera from your character's head. You can fly around, go high into the sky, or get close-up shots of a bullet mid-flight. Combine it with tm (Toggle Menus) to hide the HUD, and you have a professional photography suite. Just remember that tm hides the console too—so you'll have to type it again blindly to get your menus back.
One last pro-tip for the screenshots: sucp [number]. This changes the camera speed. If you're trying to line up a perfect cinematic shot, the default camera flies way too fast. Set it to 0.5 for those slow, dramatic pans.
Actionable Next Steps for Wasteland Architects
If you're ready to start playing God, here is how you should actually approach it to avoid ruining your fun:
- The "Safety" Save: Before you type a single character into the console, make a manual save named "BEFORE CHEATS." Do not rely on autosaves.
- Use the Help Command: If you forget an ID, type
help "item name" 4. For example,help "fiber optics" 4will list every ID associated with those words. It’s much faster than Alt-Tabbing to a wiki. - Targeting NPCs: You don't always need to type IDs. If you open the console and click on an object or person with your mouse, their ID appears at the top of the screen. You can then just type
killorresurrectorunlockwithout searching for a code. - Batch Files: If you find yourself typing the same ten commands every time you start a new game, create a
.txtfile in your Fallout 4 folder (where the.exeis) and list the commands. Name itstartup.txt. In-game, just typebat startupand it will run all of them at once.
Cheating in a single-player game isn't about "winning" because there's no one to lose against. It’s about tailoring the experience to your own patience level. Whether you're fixing a broken quest or just want to see what happens when you spawn fifty Liberty Primes in a small room, these tools are yours to use. Just maybe don't tell Preston I told you how to skip his chores.