I Put a Spell on You

[Antar]

Yes, I need help with the most bugged (maybe, a lot of competition...) quest in the game. I remember finishing it years ago when the game was new but forgot all about it. My problem: The **** R. Curtis won't show up. He did first night, but even tho I was hidden by the planes he saw me and approached me, then went back to his hole. I did not want to wait 24 hours for another night (playing hc mode), so I went to do other quests. Not long after, I went to Nellis (Boomers base), and I was listening to Pete's Boomers history lesson, when guess who entered that room - Ronald Curtis! He entered, said something random, and left right away, appearing to be just walking back to New Vegas! How the hell did he get there? Seriously, this does not make sense for some many reasons...

Well at that time I actually did not realize who that random NCR idiot at Nellis was, and after finishing there I went strait back to Camp McCarran to finish the I put a spell on you quest. And now I have the problem: Curtis no longer comes to the tower or inside. I can wait hours outside the tower or inside, nothing, no Curtis. What can I now do, is the quest forever bugged like this because the idiot Curtis wanders around the wastelands randomly? Or is there another solution to this mess?

[talgaby]

Welcome to Gamebryo engine.

You need to reset him for starters:

prid f6283
disable
enable
kill
resurrect

Then go to the McCarran terminal and teleport him there:

prid f6283
moveto player

After that, make sure the time is not in the frame where he should go to the tower, and reset the trigger:

set "f62ab".bDoneOnce to 0

Optional: move away from the McCarran area for 72 in-game hours to force a cell reset on everything. It cannot affect the quest but can affect his base AI to not interfere.
Go back, wait until night, and he should go to the tower normally. Better if you wait until he should be there and enter the area only then, so he is already spawned inside the tower.

[Antar]

I will definitely try the cell reset thing, and if that wont help, I will probably just switch to the Legion and murder all those stupid bugged NCR. I don't want to touch the console just yet... Thanks for the advice

[talgaby]

Cell reset by itself will unlikely to help you though.

[Antar]

Well I was hoping it might bring that idiot Curtis back to base McCarran. If not, I will simply switch to Legion and murder all NCR, that will work too. I still have a lot of achievements to unlock, so no console. I will report in some time how it turned out...

[dunbaratu]

Oh god, that quest.

Crap like this is why I stopped playing Fallout NV on Playstation3 and instead went ahead and got it for Steam. With this game, the debug console you get on PC isn't just for people who want to enable cheats. It's also for fixing buggy content players who aren't cheating keep encountering. I got so tired of looking up quest bug problems online and finding out that since I was playing on console, the only option was "go back to a savegame from back before the quest first got bugged, which by the way happened aboout a week of playtime ago since the bad data inserted by the bug didn't immediately manifest the problem when it first happened." while the PC players had a "type these 2 commands to reset the bogus flag in the quest" solution.

[Antar]

I feel you, but if you use the console the game then treats you like a cheater, even though it's without a doubt that absolute majority of people using the console do so to get over bloody bugs...

Anyway, I waited quite long (not sure if full 70 hours), and the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ Curtis is back at camp McCarran after his hike around New Vegas countryside. But, I still have problems:

If I come and wait hidden (full time, no "wait" function) around the airport, from midnight till sunrise, no Curtis.
If I get there and use the wait function untill 3 am, to which wiki says he should be already there. There is no Curtis.

I am hopeless. I already decided to kill off NCR but I want to somehow finish this quest without using a console. Any tips? Do I need to mess with the terminal next to the doors to the tower to trigger him coming? Is there some way how to at this stage (I alredy told Curtis "about the breakings") turn this quest to Legions favor? Or is the best solution now to just murder the retarded Curtis?

sigh...

[talgaby]

You do know that console only disables achievements until you simple restart New Vegas, right? It's not a permanent mark on the save file.

[Antar]

Originally posted by talgaby:

You do know that console only disables achievements until you simple restart New Vegas, right? It's not a permanent mark on the save file.

No, I am not aware of this. But few years ago I used 1 single command to fix a bugged quest mid game, and I stopped getting achievements for the rest of the game, which I ofc restarted countless times after that. In fact I remember that to get some game-end achievements I had to reload very old save and then quickly play it through again. But maybe I remember it wrong, I checked wiki and you should be right. Even still, I would love to solve this somehow without the console...

[talgaby]

It is highly unlikely that the quest will fix itself if it needs you to manually set a flag. Those things won't change no matter how many times you refresh a cell.