bugged quest help please

[Tom]

Locate Valdr's hunting party. When I approach him it skips the dialog to give him a healing potion and goes straight to him thanking me for the help then asking me to clear the cave. The quest objective to clear the cave seems to work just fine gives the reward and clears obj from mission log. But the original objective to find his party does not clear.

[Alex]

1. Do you have any mods? Especially the unofficial patch?
2. Have you talked to Valga Vinicia over at the Dead Man's Drink?
3. Which level are you?

Anyway, the quest is quite bugged, look up the workarounds here:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Moss_Mother_Cavern_(quest)#Bugs

[Tom]

No mods at all, should probably pick up the unofficial patch tho. I talked to Valga and got the quest from her. Level 23.

[Alex]

Then you've run into the bug where the stage doesn't get cleared, just as described on the wiki. Apply the console commands mentioned there, and for your next playthrough, install the unofficial patch. Those patches are a must-have with any Bethesda game.

[Tom]

I just applied the fix from the wiki and that did the trick thanks! and yeah I'll be sure to get the patch.

[Death Approaches]

in Beth games, there are commands to investigate quests; where you're at (the stage of the quest), the objectives needed, etc. these will immensely help with quests that don't 'work right' as they should. It's not just mod quests, even vanilla quests go wonky, it's a thing. Patches like USSEP are great, and try to fix everything, but it's a momentous undertaking.

startquest, stopquest, failallobjective, completequest cover the whole quest itself, setstage <quest> <stage> moves where you're at, getobjectivecompleted and setobjectivecompleted to show which are done and then set those steps as done or not, showquestobjectives and showqueststages to show you all the steps and the important bits, etc.

right now, you're like, "i'll never memorize those, I'll have to look them up"... and you will, at first anyway. And hundreds of hours and years of gaming later, you'll have hundreds of them memorized, without even trying. :-)

UESP is a great resource, I'll say that much. and you did the right thing, asking. Just know it won't be the only time you do this.

[Tom]

Thank you Death Approaches for the well thought out advice, i'll be writing down those console commands and looking up the bug before i go 'bugging' anyone here lol. And i do mean bugging in jest, you guys have been very helpful!

[Alex]

Originally posted by Tom:

Thank you Death Approaches for the well thought out advice, i'll be writing down those console commands and looking up the bug before i go 'bugging' anyone here lol. And i do mean bugging in jest, you guys have been very helpful!

Just bookmark this page:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Console
But beware, using console commands may screw up your save, so always make a backup before you start experimenting.

[Death Approaches]

he means blindly trying random ones... just because you read something doesn't make it a good idea, but also, breaking the game is part of learning Skyrim with modding, too. It all depends on your interest in "that side" of things. The longer you play, the more that world will "call" to you, it's just a thing that happens. :-) What ELSE can I put in here?!

some invocations are very powerful, and in that standard computer programming adage, "ah crap, it did exactly what I told it to do." applies... as long as you work within the context of what you should be doing, it's 100% fine, it's literally how the missions and all scripting in the game are implemented, you're just helping things along. It's a developer console not a cheat console. Tho is is mostly used for cheating.

but say one of those quest stages was to get something like a key or dragon claw first; you move the quest along to the point you are supposed to have it, but you don't. You could give it to yourself with another command, player.additem, but you won't even know that you need to. So you bypass the claw puzzle door and walk through it like a ghost with 'tcl' or pretend you had a key for it with 'unlock' on the door. That's fine too. The quest won't care in the least. This is what we had to do back in the day, for dozens of goofy things. Thank the mod community that UESSP goes to great lengths to fix hundreds of these things, and our gaming lives would be poorer without it. It is highly recommended.

But his warning is apt, if you get a bit heavy-handed in using them, or make a typo and change something you didn't mean to, of use some of the bulk commands that change lots of things at once with a sledgehammer and not a light touch, with save state persistence, could have glitched something dozens of hours away from now and not even know, til it rears up with "WTH is going on?!" craziness, much later...

That's where UESP comes in, and is our go-to, be-all / end-all of Elder Scrolls data, even game lore. It's an extensive repository of ES knowledge. Even has a mirror of Bethesda's Creation Kit wiki on it.