Using the Console
- Press the ~ (tilde) key at any time while playing to bring up the console window. In it, you can type any cheat command and press ENTER to make it happen.
NOTE: The game is automatically paused when you bring up the console, but you can right-click to resume play while leaving the console window up. This can be useful for monitoring certain things, but it kind of gets in the way of the view.
You can type "help" (without the quote marks) and press ENTER to get a list of many console commands. Similarly, the "sv" command will bring up a long list of global variables.
Several of the cheat info sections mention selecting yourself or another person or thing in the game. This means you need to stand to where you can see the person or item you're selecting, press ~ to get the console window, and then click on the person or item to get its internal codename to appear in parenthesis in the console window's title bar. (Note that to select yourself, you must switch to third-person view with TAB and click on yourself.)
NOTE: You can scroll back through the console commands with the UP ARROW and DOWN ARROW keys, and can repeat a command by pressing ENTER when it's displayed.
NOTE: Quote marks (") are only needed around a command's parameter if it has one or more spaces or apostrophes in it. For instance, using "additem" to give yourself the Daedric crescent doesn't need quotes (player->additem daedric_crescent_unique 1), though adding them in won't hurt anything. The command to give yourself a bonemold long bow does need quotes (player->additem "bonemold long bow" 1), and leaving them out will cause an error.