Fallout 4, as is often the case with many of Bethesda’s open-world RPGs, is pretty buggy. While occasional texture or animation issues aren’t much cause for concern, major issues can arise when a missing NPC or quest step prevents the player from accessing main quest progress. If this happens, there is a way around it, but you have to be careful. That’s why we prepared this guide to force start quests in Fallout 4, so you never miss a single one.
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How to Force Start a Mission in Fallout 4
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To force start a quest in Fallout 4, you need to use console commands. To do this, you need to open the console with the Tilde key, which looks like this ‘~‘ and should be next to ‘1‘ key. Once the console is open, you need to use the ShowQuestStages command, which is often abbreviated as ‘squares‘ to find all the stages that might have the quest you’re looking for. A mission will go through these stages as you progress. If you want to follow a mission and see all its steps, enter ‘squares *******‘ where the text * is replaced by the mission ID. For example, searching for the nuclear option which sees it aligned with the railroad has a search ID of ‘MQ302RR’.
You need to know the ID of the mission you want to tackle. Then when you know it, you should check all the steps you have. We will use the example above to guide you. We know the mission ID, so we would open the console and type ‘square MQ302RR‘ to see a list of each search step and associated identifiers. The list shows us that the first step of this search has ID ‘ten‘. Now you have to write ‘SetStage MQ302RR 10‘ to activate the mission and see how it starts in the game.
How to Find Quest ID in Fallout 4
To find the id of the mission you want to start, you can open the console and type ‘request for help 0‘. This opens a list of all quests in the game. You can now scroll down the list until you find the quest you are looking for and use that ID.
However, if you know the name of the quest you are looking for, you can type ‘aid
Should you use console commands to force start quests in Fallout 4?
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Each mission in Fallout 4 works as a series of integer-based stages. Each time the player completes a mission-tagged task, the number associated with that mission’s internal ID is updated with that of the next stage. This triggers the next step of the quest and allows you to move on and complete it. Sometimes a mission’s internal ID won’t update, or a series of choices you’ve made in your game so far will cause an error that prevents a mission from starting in the first place. Forcing a mission to start ensures you can play it, but there’s a chance you’ll miss any preambles before. Unfortunately, this is a side effect of using console commands to force start in-game missions.
Forcing quests to start in Fallout 4 can be dangerous as there is always a chance that it will corrupt your save file. We recommend that you make a save if you plan to start forced missions. Bethesda has stated in the past that there are systems in Fallout 4 that ensure that all quests eventually show up, even if they’re buggy. But that doesn’t always happen when you want it to, that’s where force-starting a mission comes in. If you desperately want to play a buggy mission, try force-starting it and see what happens . If you can wait, we suggest you do so and explore the desert more.
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