Fallout 3 Console Commands "For Dummies"?

[MatSpikeYinsen]

  On 4/23/2025 at 10:45 PM, JimboUK said:

In your shoes I would load a save from before that quest started and try again to see if that bug is still triggered.

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Unfortunately I played a long long long long long time after Hannibal wandered off in a random direction for unclear reasons; it was months and months later that I learned of the known bug (looking at the wiki is a very recent habit, mostly because I was avoiding spoilers).  I could make a version of the character who finished the quest, but it would be a level 19 instead of a 22, and I have too many variations on this character already.

[MatSpikeYinsen]

  On 4/21/2025 at 10:55 AM, JimboUK said:

For Dogmeat try opening the console, clicking on him and entering disable and then enable, don't click away until you've re-enabled him. If that doesn't work use the kill command on him and try spawning a new one, you can do that by entering player.placeatme 0006a772 1 into the console, then when you've got him enter setessential 0006a772 1 which will make him essential so he doesn't die again.  

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Finally got around to trying this, minus the setessential part since that doesn't seem relevant to my situation (the point was not to keep dogmeat from dying in future, it was just to undo a past death once).  Alas, when enabled or spawned, he "talks" to me with no dialogue, and I still can't talk to him.

[JimboUK]

Disabling and then enabling should work. Try this, if you have Broken Steel installed then try Player.AddPerk xx003211 

Replace the XX with the first two characters of whatever your load order number for Broken Steel is, wait three days and you should have a new Dogmeat outside Vault 101. 

The problem with the console is it can break your save in a myriad of ways, often in ways that are hard to fix for the person with access to the borked game and damn near impossible for a third party over the internet.