You’ve been wandering the Mojave for three hours. Your legs are crippled, you’re out of Stimpacks, and a pack of Cazadores just spotted you from across the ridge. We've all been there. It sucks.
Normally, you'd just reload a save from twenty minutes ago and hope for the best, but sometimes you just want to play God. That’s where fallout new vegas console commands come in. It isn't just about cheating, though. Sure, giving yourself 10,000 caps is fun for a minute, but these tools are basically the duct tape holding the Gamebryo engine together. If a quest-critical NPC falls through the floor or a door refuses to unlock because of a scripting error, the console is your only way out.
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Honestly, the "PC Master Race" meme exists largely because of the tilde key. On consoles, if your game breaks, you’re done. On PC, you just open the hood and fix the engine yourself.
Getting Started Without Breaking Everything
To even start, you hit the tilde key (~), which is usually right under the Escape key. The game freezes, the UI disappears, and a little cursor blinks at the bottom left.
One thing people always forget: using console commands disables Steam achievements for that session. If you care about those little digital trophies, you have to enter your commands, save the game, exit to desktop, and then relaunch. It’s a bit of a hassle, but it works.
If you type something and it says "script not found," you probably made a typo. The engine is picky. It doesn't care about capital letters, but it hates extra spaces. Also, many commands require you to click on an object while the console is open. If you want to delete a stubborn rock, you open the console, click the rock until its ID code appears at the top of the screen, and then type your command.
The Fallout New Vegas Console Commands That Actually Matter
Most lists just spam you with five hundred useless codes you'll never use. Let's talk about the ones that actually save your life when the Mojave decides to be difficult.
tgm is the classic. God mode. Infinite health, infinite ammo, infinite oxygen. You become a walking tank. It’s great for testing out a new weapon or just venting some frustration on a Deathclaw nest, but it gets boring fast.
A more nuanced version is tdm, or Total Damage Threshold. You still take hits, but your armor acts like a brick wall. It feels a bit more "lore-friendly" if you're roleplaying a cybernetic super-soldier.
Then there’s tcl. Toggle Collision.
If you get stuck between two rocks—which happens way too often near Red Rock Canyon—this is your best friend. It lets you fly through walls and floors. Just remember to turn it off once you're on level ground, or you’ll just drift off into the stratosphere like a confused ghost.
Fixing Broken Quests and NPCs
New Vegas is a masterpiece, but it’s a buggy masterpiece. Obsidian famously had about eighteen months to build this entire world, and the cracks show.
Sometimes, an NPC like Craig Boone just... disappears. He’s not dead. He’s just gone. You can use prid 00096bdf followed by moveto player. That forces the game to grab his character model and teleport it directly to your face.
If a quest is stuck because a stage didn't trigger, you use sqs [QuestID] to see all the stages. Then, setstage [QuestID] [StageNumber] pushes the story forward. Be careful with this one. If you skip a stage that was supposed to hand you a physical item, you might find yourself at the end of the quest without the reward you were promised.
Speaking of items, the player.additem command is the one most people use to "fix" their bank account. You need the Hex ID for the item. For example, player.additem 0000000f 5000 gives you 5,000 caps. The "f" is the code for currency. It’s easy to remember because "F" is for "Fortune." Probably.
Why You Should Stop Using "KillAll"
I see people recommending killall all the time. Don't do it.
Basically, it sends a "die" signal to every non-essential entity in your immediate loading cell. This includes the enemies you're fighting, but it also includes the merchant’s Brahmin, the nearby stray dogs, and potentially quest-givers who aren't marked as "essential."
If you absolutely must delete someone from existence, use zap. You click the target and type it. They don't just die; they vanish from the game's memory for that session. It’s cleaner. Or, if you just want them to stop shooting at you so you can talk, try setally 0001b2a4 0004319d 1 1. That makes the Powder Gangers and the Player best friends instantly. It’s weird, but it works.
Advanced Tweaks: Beyond Just Cheating
Most players think fallout new vegas console commands are just for items, but you can actually change how the game feels.
If you find the walking speed too slow—and let's be real, trekking across the Dry Wells is a slog—you can use setgs fMoveRunMult [number]. The default is 4. Setting it to 6 or 7 makes you feel significantly more athletic without looking like you're glitching through time.
The Camera and Screenshots
For the folks who like taking "aesthetic" shots of the sunset over New Vegas, tfc 1 is mandatory. It toggles a free-flying camera and freezes time. You can fly around, find the perfect angle of a sunset behind the Lucky 38, and snap your photo.
Pair that with tm (Toggle Menus) to hide the HUD, and you've got a professional photography suite inside a game from 2010. Just don't forget that when the HUD is hidden, the console is also invisible. You’ll have to type tm again blindly to get your menus back.
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Changing Your Physicality
You can actually change your character's height with setscale [number].
The default is 1.0.
Setting it to 1.1 makes you a bit of a giant, while 0.9 makes you shorter.
Interestingly, height in the Gamebryo engine affects movement speed and jump height. If you're bigger, you move faster because your "legs" cover more ground per animation cycle. It’s a weird quirk of the physics engine that most people never notice.
If you hate your character's face, showracemenu lets you redesign your looks mid-game. Careful, though: doing this can sometimes reset your skills or perks if you change your race entirely (like switching to a custom modded race). Always save before you try to fix your nose.
Technical Maintenance and Stability
Sometimes the game just starts chugging. Frame rates drop, the memory leaks, and everything feels sluggish.
While not a "command" in the traditional sense, using the console to clear the cell buffers can help. Typing pcb (Purge Cell Buffer) forces the game to dump all the textures and data from areas you've already left. If you’ve been playing for four hours straight and the game feels "heavy," this can prevent a crash.
Handling the "Dead Money" Frustration
We love Dead Money, but those collars are a nightmare. If you’re on your fifth playthrough and you just want to enjoy the story of Elijah and Sierra Madre without your head exploding every ten seconds, you can use set vmadrecollarcreeper to 0.
It’s specific. It’s niche. But it saves lives (specifically yours).
Managing Faction Reputation
Did you accidentally shoot a NCR trooper and now the whole Republic wants your head on a pike? You don't have to restart.
Use addreputation 000f43de 1 10.
The first number is the NCR’s internal ID. The '1' tells the game you want to add "fame." The '10' is the amount.
If you want to remove "infamy" (the bad stuff), you’d use removereputation 000f43de 0 10.
The '0' represents the infamy track.
This is way better than just using god mode because it allows the world's social systems to keep functioning, just... with a little bit of cosmic intervention in your favor.
Common Misconceptions About Commands
One big myth is that using the console permanently "corrupts" your save file.
That’s mostly false.
While you can definitely break things—like using setstage to jump to the end of the game—the act of using a command doesn't inherently rot the data.
The real danger is Save Bloat.
If you spawn 1,000 Sunset Sarsaparilla bottles in the middle of Goodsprings, the game has to remember the physics and location of every single one of those bottles forever. That makes your save file bigger and slower. If you're going to experiment, do it, then reload a clean save.
Another thing: people think fov (Field of View) is a permanent setting. It’s not. If you type fov 90, it looks great, but as soon as you look at your Pip-Boy or enter a scripted conversation, it might snap back to the default 75. To make it stick, you usually have to edit the .ini files in your Documents folder, but the console is a good way to test which setting looks best on your monitor before you commit to the file edit.
The Survival Mode Trick
If you're playing on Hardcore mode, the console is almost a necessity because of how the game handles companion death. In the vanilla game, if Rex dies, he's gone.
If you find that too stressful but still want the hunger and thirst mechanics, you can use setessential 0010d8df 1. This makes Rex "essential," meaning he'll just get knocked unconscious instead of dying. You get the survival challenge without the emotional trauma of losing your cyborg dog because of a pathing glitch.
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Actionable Steps for Your Next Playthrough
Don't just go in and type tgm. It kills the fun. Instead, use the console as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
- Backup your save. Seriously. Before you touch a single quest-related command, make a hard save.
- Find your IDs. Use sites like the Fallout Wiki to find specific RefIDs for items or NPCs. Don't guess.
- Use 'help'. If you can't remember the ID for an "Anti-Materiel Rifle," type
help "anti-materiel" 4. The console will spit out the ID codes for everything with that name. The "4" at the end tells it to look for item IDs specifically. - Fix the "Grey Screen." If you get the annoying tinted screen after a certain quest or effect, type
rim 0. It resets the image space modifiers.
The Mojave is a harsh place, and the engine it runs on is even harsher. These commands aren't just cheats; they're your toolkit. Use them to bypass the bugs, tailor the difficulty to your liking, and keep the story moving when the game decides to trip over its own shoelaces.
Just remember: once you start spawning Mini-Nukes, the mystery of the wasteland disappears pretty fast. Use the power wisely. Or don't. It's your desert.
Check your current "Infamy" levels with factions before you start tweaking reputations, as certain thresholds trigger hit squads that might ignore your new "Fame" settings if the "Infamy" is still too high. Adjust both tracks to be safe.
Final tip for the truly stuck: if your character is physically stuck in the floor and tcl isn't working, try coc GSGhetlowRoom. It teleports you to a developer test room. From there, you can fast travel out to a safe location like Goodsprings. It's the ultimate "get out of jail free" card for a broken save.