Witcher 3 Ruined Inn (Abandoned Site) fix

2018-08-30
fun>video games

Backstory

Witcher 3 is certainly a fun game, however just like every other open world game it has bugs. Most of them are harmless, but can be quite annoying, especially if you’re trying to clean the question marks from the map.

The bug in this case regards the Ruined Inn in Skellige. It’s an abandoned point that has a few sirens and their nest. Sometimes however the sirens run away leaving you unable to actually clear the abandoned site. Of course, if you recognise that you’ve run into this you’ll just reload and try again, however if you don’t, you might carry on thinking that you need to return later (like I did). This is a known bug, but it was never been fixed and never will be.

Sadly figuring out how to fix this using a console isn’t as straightforward as it could be. Very few console commands are properly documented, and even then you have to figure out the quest state (called a ‘fact’ within the engine) and it’s not easy to find a list with all of the quest phases. There’s also no save game editors (there are save file viewers, but their output probably only makes sense to Red Engine developers) and any kind of documentation on Red Engine internals is scarce.

Fixing the issue

Fixing the issue is possible, but only on PC with console enabled. I’ve tried various methods to reset the NPCs in Ruined Inn using in-game methods, but I couldn’t manage to do so.

You can enable the console in one of two ways - changing a config file or by using a mod.

After enabling it, load your save, go to the ruined inn, open the console, and run the following command -

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addfact(sk75_sirens_dead)

After a few seconds the liberation sequence should play.

For reference, here are all of the phases involved in this Abandoned Point liberation quest -

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== living_world/phases/skellige/ard_skellig/lw_skl_ard_skellig.w2phase:
  hr204_completed
  sk106_cont_open
  sk75_destro
  sk75_lamia_dead
  sk75_liberated
  sk75_sirens_dead

Try setting the other stages if the sk75_sirens_dead one does not work for you, but in most cases it’s a siren that bugs out and it should work.

For a what seems to be a complete list of all the quest-related facts, refer to this comment. Backup of the file can be found here.