You’re playing Skyrim with you level 30+ character, working on getting that sideways achievement when you end up bugging a quest. You want to thrown the controller in rage because you just sunk almost 60 hours into the game and you want all the achievements so you can brag to all your friends that you owned Skyrim. Now with a bugged quest, you don’t know what to do.
Well, there is a solution to your problem. A BIG solution.
If you are coming from reading my Skyrim review, curious how this is even possible, welcome. This is my first How To article, so pardon if it is a bit jarring to read.
I am also not taking any credit on figuring this out. But I am sure many of you playing Skyrim might have missed this nugget of an article on Reddit. A little over 3 weeks ago, a person who goes by vw_luke over on Reddit posted up a Public Service Announcement about how you can swap the save files between the two games. You can read the original write up right
here if you want to.
So how do you do it? (in full detail)
You are going to need:
- USB Flash Drive (Thumb Drive) with at least 1GB of space, the 360 hates the smaller ones.
- A copy of Skyrim on PC (or a friend that has it, in my case)
- A program call Modio which can be found here.
- Pop the flash drive into one of the usb slots on the xbox 360.
- Go into settings, select storage then select the usb. Have the xbox configure the flash drive so it works with the console. Hopefully you backed up anything you had saved on the flash drive.
- Find where your skyrim save is on your xbox and copy it onto the flash drive.
- pop the flash drive out of the xbox and then into the computer that has skyrim on it.
- Open Modio and click open from device.
- Locate the save file and open it.
- Click the file contents tab. Extract Savegame.dat
- Rename to savegame.ess put it into your Skyrim save game location.
- Boot up Skyrim and load up that save file.
Now that you are in Skyrim on PC you can use the console commands to debug any quests you may be having a problem with. I used the “player.additem item# -1″ command to have the game remove an item, it thought I had to debug one of the quests I was on and it worked. You can also do this to have access to all the content the modded sommunity developed for Skyrim at a later date, without having to start up a new character specifically for the PC version of the game. Also, rumor has it that you can so this with ALL Bethesda games.
If you go to the Skyrim Wiki page, it has a list of the item numbers in the game and a list of the commands that work. The wiki can be found
here, and it has a lot of great information about how to debug some of your quests, and also if you aren’t sure if you bugged a quest, it will give you a heads up if you did or didn’t.
“But Xeserox HOW do we get the file back onto our 360?” Well that is just as easy.
- Rename pc save game to “Savegame.dat” exactly.
- Open Modio and click “Open from a device.” and then find your device and save game from Xbox. Any Skyrim save will do.
- Go to File Contents and right click the Savegame.dat and hit Replace File, then find on your pc “Savegame.dat” to replace it with.
- Go back to General File Info and hit “Rehash and Resign.”
- Press “Save to Device”
- Now you can move the save to Xbox.
Like I said, I did this for my xbox save and it worked. Now I know a few of your out there might do this for a few evil reasons, and I will say that I am against that. I also know that the achievements for the game doesn’t transfer between the two platforms. Basically, you can’t get all the Steam achievements from doing it on your xbox and vice versa.
