Lost your gnome? - How to find it without sv_cheats

Did you lose your gnome while trying to take it to the end of the game? Fear not as long as you are still relatively close to where it was you can get it back without enabling 'sv_cheats' and disabling your achievement progress!

Wheres my gnome?

The Story

I was doing the "Gnome Vault of My Own" achievement, where a player must take "Gnome Chompski" from the very beginning of the game (where you get your gravity gloves) to the very end (which I wont spoil). Fun times were had. I was about 6 hours into the game with my buddy who I'd named 'Norman the Gnome' when the worst happened, he was gone!

I had dropped him so that I could use my other hand to reload. After the fight was over I went to collect my travel buddy and could not find him anywhere.

Normally this isn't an issue as one can just go back and load a previous save where one had the gnome and continue with usually only one or two minutes of time loss. However I had somehow managed to be in the worst possible spot where there was an autosave location that I had hit.
Even then there should be your last three autosaves plus your quicksave surely at least one of them would have the gnome.

Well no... I had hit the autosave point three times overwriting all of the previous saves and the quicksave was from two hours ago... Did I really have to load my quicksave and replay two chapters?

Not if I could help it!

Why not just spawn another gnome?

Do not use "sv_cheats 1!"
To spawn a new gnome one must enable "sv_cheats 1" in the console and this disables achievements so it is out of the question since the achievement is what we're going for in the first place!

But there is a way!

Not all commands in Half Life Alyx require cheats, obviously you cant enable god mode without it, but there are some tools that you can use without it.

The console

Enabling the console in the game isn't super challenging. You need to set some launch options in the games properties and then you're good to go.

1. Start by right clicking Half Life Alyx in your steam library and select "properties".
   
2. Click the button labeled "Set Launch options".
   
3. Copy-Paste the following into the text box and hit ok

    -console -vconsole 

4. Now start the game and load up where you are in the game

Does my gnome still exist?

Once you're in the game hit "~" on your keyboard to open up the console. This will open on your pc so you will have to take off your VR headset to type the commands.

it may look intimidating but all you really need to know is that the bottom text box is where you type the commands.


Now that you have the console open you can enter in in the following and hopefully see a similar output (where the entindex may be different)

 ent_find gnome 

If you get this result then Good News the gnome still exists somewhere on the level and can be recovered

Finding / Retrieving my gnome

Now that you know that the gnome exists you can try and look for it using the following:

Show text: ent_text gnome
Hide text: ent_text_clear gnome 

This may be enough to just find the gnome itself, but if it's inside a wall, underneath the floor or otherwise inaccessible then here's how to get it back.

ent_teleport gnome

This should teleport the gnome to where the player is looking! Thus the player can now continue with their merry adventure with their gnome friend. After quicksaving of course!

As a final bit of cleanup you can close the console and clear out the launch options so that the next time you launch the game you can't accidentally open the console, or don't it doesn't really matter.

ALL THE COMMANDS!!!

Here's a convenient link to a document containing all the commands (and brief explanations) that exist for Half Life Alyx:

Convenient Link[docs.google.com]

Beware the file is massive and may lag on some browsers.

Credit to BubblesAndSuch who compiled this list. Check out his console command guide that helped me figure out how to get my gnome back.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2040205272

[JustaWaffle]

THANKS SO MUCH! I was just nearing the end of captivity, when I realized I was no longer holding him. My most recent save with him was in Jeff, so I really didn’t want to reload. Turns out he was hiding behind a box.

[andersenman]

Interesting! I just happened to have lost it myself; it literally disappeared from my hand when I was about to step into the yard from the room with the bottomless pit, the glowy spitters and "the last fabricator". Might as well use the opportunity to test this. Thanks!

[DOOT]

will ent_setname !picker gnome work?

[(: 0mega1Spawn :)]

unless that changed.

[(: 0mega1Spawn :)]

You can spawn a gnome without disabling achievements.

[NULLRAD]

oh yeah, the ent_create doesnt work without sv_cheats does it?

[BungyJohn]

Thank you for this, helped a bunch!

[Officially Overlord]

If you read the story at the beginning you will see that I lost him at a horrible point where there was an autosave point in the middle of the battle and i managed to walk in and out of it three times while fighting overwriting all three autosaves

[Rupert Pupkin]

You could also just load up a recent save (The game autosaves like all the time). This should work if you just check whether you have Gnome Chompski in your hand every now and then.
This is what i did the few times i lost him (except for when i just found him laying around that is)

No need for these "Cheaty" measures that you are suggesting...