Getting Started With The Console
You open the console by pressing the tilde key, that little button under Esc on most keyboards. It brings up a semi-transparent prompt where you type commands. Fallout New Vegas doesn't lock you out of using it, but it does spam you with errors if you type garbage. I learned that the hard way after about an hour of frustration. The base command for god mode is tgm. Type it exactly like that and hit enter. Your character becomes invulnerable to everything - damage, radiation, gravity pulling you off cliffs. Infinite ammo comes from tcl combined with some scripting, but there's a simpler route. The command for that is also tgm, because when you're essentially a ghost in the game world, ammo usage stops mattering. If you want to be more surgical about it, you can use set PlayerUseWeaponSights to 1 or manipulate individual values through the console, but honestly tgm covers most of what people actually want. I spent maybe two weeks troubleshooting why my ammo counts weren't sticking after reloading saves. Turns out the game resets certain player variables on load unless you pin them down properly. My workaround was just wrapping tgm in a simple script that re-applies every time the game loads. Not elegant, but it worked.
Commands That Actually Matter
Here's what I've found useful over hundreds of playthroughs. There's a list that goes on forever, but these are the ones I actually use. tcl toggles noclip. You walk through walls. You fall through the map occasionally. It's not reliable for traversal unless you know exactly what you're doing. I've had my character spawn inside solid rock multiple times and have to reload. Takes about three minutes per incident. player.additem followed by the item ID and quantity gives you anything. Found items, weapons, caps, ammunition, recipes - everything has a code. The trick is finding the right code. The console's help command works for some things, but most IDs require an external lookup table or the Creation Kit. I keep a text file open with around two hundred common IDs. Saves me five to ten minutes per session instead of hunting through websites.
kill lets you end any NPC or creature instantly. Useful for testing, terrible for quest progression. Use it and you might soft-lock yourself out of entire quest lines. I learned this after accidentally killing someone who turned out to be a quest giver for three different factions. Reload saved me.
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Things That Break When You Use These
There's no getting around it - console commands mess things up. Quest markers disappear sometimes. NPCs stop spawning. Save files get corrupted if you push too far. The game wasn't designed for this level of interference, so don't expect stability. The biggest issue I've encountered is inventory overflow. When you start adding thousands of items, the game begins dropping objects randomly. I had a save where I spawned approximately four thousand weapon mods and the game started deleting random world objects to compensate. Map locations changed. Doors vanished. The game was basically rewriting its own world data in real time. I recommend backing up your save files before doing anything substantial. They go in Documents/My Games/FalloutNV/Saves. Copy the folder elsewhere. If something breaks, you're looking at losing anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours of progress depending on how far gone the corruption gets.
Advanced Stuff Nobody Talks About
There are commands that let you manipulate time, weather, difficulty scaling, and even faction reputations. SetDifficulty changes how hard enemies are. SetStage moves a quest forward or backward regardless of whether you've completed the prerequisites. Both work, but both can corrupt quest states if you don't understand how the quest graph is structured. Another useful one is togglegrid. It shows you the wireframe of the world. Good for understanding level design, bad for actual gameplay since it makes everything look like a mesh nightmare. I used it once for about twenty minutes trying to figure out why a particular building had collision issues. Turned out the developer had left gaps in the geometry. Nothing you can do about it except avoid that area. For infinite ammo specifically, if tgm isn't cutting it because you want to keep playing normally while having unlimited bullets, try setplayerav value 50 for damage resistance and setplayerav value 50 for health. Then manually add ammo with player.additem and the correct ammunition form ID. It's slower than tgm but keeps the game somewhat functional.
What To Avoid Completely
Don't use respawn commands during active quests. Don't manipulate faction reputation directly unless you want every faction to hate you. Don't try to teleport yourself to locations that haven't loaded yet. All of these cause the same kind of cascading failures I mentioned earlier. The game has about a forty-five minute recovery time if you break a major quest state, assuming you can recover at all. Some commands simply don't work in Fallout New Vegas the way they work in other Bethesda titles. tmm 1 and other fast-travel cheats often return undefined command errors. The console is more limited than people expect, which is probably why tgm exists as a catch-all instead of individual feature toggles. If you're looking for a downloadable solution, there aren't really any standalone tools that work reliably. Most "console command managers" from mod sites are either outdated or contain malware. The built-in console is actually the safest route. It's been there since launch, it hasn't changed significantly, and it's not going anywhere.
