Proper Bug Testing Through Console?

[Acejhm]

So, I have encountered a few issues in my game that I can't nail down a cause too. For example, Proventus isn't allowing me to purchase Breezehome after completing "Bleak Falls Barrow", or I can't purchase anything from merchants in Solitude. I have been trying to do my due diligence and figure out what mods are causing my issues by removing a few mods and then using either coc commands from the main menu or "Alternate Start" to start a new game in a certain area. In regards to the Breezehome bug, I then use the console to complete the Bleak Falls Barrow quest and give myself 10,000 gold. After still not being able to purchase the house or buy/sell in Solitude after several removals of suspect mods, I finally launched Skyrim normally (I'm using Mod Organizer so launching through steam activates zero mods) and did the same thing as before only to find that the same issues persisted. I then deleted local content and re-downloaded all the Skyrim files only to still find the issues there.

 

Therefore, my question is this: What is the proper way to test via the console both quest-related and other bugs so that I can accurately tell whether a bug has been fixed?

 

I get the feeling that testing through the console may be producing glitches that are causing more problems than are being fixed by removing mods because I'm getting some of these issues even in vanilla Skyrim. At the same time, I don't want to have to spend 30 minutes doing all the necessary quests/traveling to get to where some of the bugs are happening only to have to start over with a different mod set if it's not fixed.

 

 

 

Any information would be much appreciated.

[Acejhm]

Answering my own question (and anyone who's google searching this), yes and no. "coc" commands work fine for testing, no issues are caused there. Bug-testing quests are tricky though. I looked through the Creation Kit and there are a lot of stages not listed on the Skyrim wiki that are more-or-less "maintenance/prep" stages. Nothing the player sees occurs, but setup for upcoming stages does happen. Like setting spawn points, or loading enemies and such. So, if you decided to test a quest, you need to sequentially go through every stage in order allowing a few seconds between each command for scripts to process. And even then it's not 100% accurate, as sometimes, as I learned from the Creation Kit, different quests set stages in each other without you even seeing it. The first few stages of "Dragons Rising" actually ends the quest for "Bleak Falls Barrow", so it's a little confusing. Annnnddd, alllll the dialogue occurs in "quests" too, which makes it even trickier when you bypass the standard progression using "setstage" commands. Just thought I'd share.