The developer left the door open.

How cheat mode actually works

Start by throwing out the version of this you have probably read somewhere. Daggerfall has no console. It has no developer mode menu. It has no text-entry interface where you type a command and something happens. The entire cheat system is one line in a configuration file, and everything it unlocks is a single key press.

Open Z.CFG in your DAGGER folder with any plain text editor and add the line CHEATMODE 1. Save the file, start the game normally, and the cheat keys respond. There is no menu, no confirmation prompt and no way to toggle it from inside a running game. If you edit the file while the game is open and then exit, your change may be overwritten, so close Daggerfall first.

This requires patch v1.07.212 or later. On anything older the line does nothing at all, which is probably why so many people concluded that Daggerfall has no cheats. It does. It has nine, and one of them works without the flag.

The cheat key reference

That is the whole list. Everything below requires CHEATMODE 1 in Z.CFG except ALT-F11, which is always available. The two entries marked unreleased are leftovers the developer left wired up and never finished.

The codes that do not exist

Here is the single most repeated false claim about Daggerfall: that there are cheats to give yourself items, set your level or add experience. There are not. Not in the retail game, not as hidden debug commands, not as a cheat menu nobody found.

What you are usually reading about is a third-party editor or external utility that edits the save file and the game data directly. Those tools genuinely can hand you a Forkhorn or set your level, and they are extremely useful. They are also not Daggerfall. Nothing about them is a cheat mode, nothing about them is an in-game feature, and if a list describes them as typed codes you can enter while playing, the list is wrong on two counts at once.

What the real cheats do cover is money, speed, safety and travel. That is genuinely enough to remove the grind that annoys people, and it is enough to finish the game without touching a single external tool. Anything more elaborate than that is an editor, not a cheat.

DOSBox and CTRL-F remapping

Half of all "the cheats do not work" reports are actually a DOSBox problem. DOSBox claims many CTRL-F combinations for its own use, and it swallows them before Daggerfall's handler ever sees the keystroke. The cheat works fine. Your emulator ate it.

The fix, in order

1. Open the DOSBox keymapper and remap CTRL to ALT.
2. Now the game receives ALT-F1, ALT-F4, ALT-F9 and ALT-F11 instead.
3. Press f before ctrl (or alt, post-remap). Order matters.
4. Look for the CHEAT CODE ENTERED message. If it appears, the code registered.

Two cheats are immune to this problem because they use no CTRL at all: the 1 speed key, and the - and = reputation and skill pair. Test with 1 first. If your character suddenly moves at roughly six times normal speed, cheat mode is working and the problem is your keymap, not your config.

Enchantment and spell exploits

These are exploits, not features. None of them are cheats, all of them are bugs or edge cases in the item and spell systems, and every one of them is a reason to plan your potions and spell list more carefully.

Infinite magicka at your own feet

Cast an area-of-effect spell directly on yourself while wearing the Spell Absorption effect. The spell costs you nothing and the effect keeps you topped up, so you can chain area spells indefinitely. Wearing Immunity to Magic instead does the equivalent for area damage: you take none of it, and you never run dry.

Soul binding with no side effect

Soul trapping normally damages the caster through the soul's resistance. Fill the item's enchantment power list before you bind it and the trap lands clean. The result is a permanent Soul Trap on an item that is effectively free to carry, which is the foundation of several legitimate late-game builds.

Mastery floors your whole spellbook

Push a magic school to 100% or higher mastery and every spell in that school drops to the five spell-point minimum cost. A school you have mastered becomes free to cast, permanently, regardless of how complex the spell is. This is the strongest single reward in Daggerfall and it is entirely reachable through legitimate play.

Character creation exploits

Two of these are worth knowing before you make your character rather than after, because they change what an optimal build even looks like.

The U key resets the attribute counter

In ClassMaker, pressing U resets the add/remove counter used to distribute attribute points. It does not add free points, it resets the accounting, which lets you set every attribute to 10 for a minimum-stat spread, or every attribute to 75 for a flat high-stat spread. Both are outside what the normal point budget allows.

Reaching level 32

The usual character build tops out around level 29 or 30. If you minimise your starting skills instead, capping the three Primary skills at 99 and taking one of them to exactly 100, you can push to level 32. You trade early power for a permanent ceiling increase, which pays off over an entire playthrough rather than in the first dungeon.

Our character creation guide covers the ordinary builds. These two tricks sit on top of them, and you should decide deliberately whether you want them, because a level 32 character plays very differently in the first ten hours.

Free training exploits

Daggerfall trains skills through use, and the rate depends on the skill. Several loops let you train indefinitely without a teacher, a fight you have to win, or gold.

Soul Trap with no vessel

Soul Trap an enemy with no soul vessel available to practise spells for as long as you like. There is no timer and no cost. This is the cleanest infinite spell practice in the game and it works on any target that will hold still for a moment.

Jump in a doorway

Hold jump while standing in a doorway and you can train Jumping while the game drains your fatigue as if you were exhausting yourself. You are paying in stamina instead of time, which for a player who does not need to be anywhere is free.

Face north before sleeping outdoors

Rest outdoors facing north and the monster spawns behind you. That gives you free practice on Stealth and Backstabbing every single night, with no travel and no target hunting.

Pickpocket dungeon NPCs

Pickpocketing is effectively unlimited practice. The NPCs inside dungeons are dense, stationary, and have nothing to lose. Do it as long as you like.

Save-scum rerolls

Reloading a save in Daggerfall does not just restore your position. It rerolls the contents of lootable things that were never opened. This is the most useful single mechanic on the page, and it works with no cheats at all.

Containers and corpses

Any loot container or corpse you looted has its contents rerolled when you reload. Keep a save from before you opened a chest, open it, dislike the result, reload, and it is a fresh chest. Repeat until you get what you were after.

Shop stock

Enter a town, save inside a nearby building, then walk into a store and trade. The shop's inventory is rerolled on load, so you get a fresh roll of the day's stock. This is how you catch a rare item that was not there yesterday, and it is worth pairing with our shopping guide, which covers who stocks what.

The Rusty Ogre footlocker trick

Inn footlockers can contain Daedric weapons. Save, search the footlocker, and if the result is not what you wanted, reload and search again. Once you get one you like, stow it in your wagon, recall out of the inn and sell it at the worst merchant you can find, because the price gap on a Daedric blade is enormous.

World exploits

These are the bugs that break the simulation rather than the character. They are the reason experienced players keep save files that look unreasonable to a newcomer.

Fast travel to yourself

Travel cautiously to the town you are already standing in and health, fatigue and magicka all fully restore, in roughly one in-game hour. It is the cheapest healing method in the game and it costs nothing but waiting.

Flying without levitation

From patch v1.07.213, hold jump, equip a weapon and swing repeatedly at empty air. Each swing lifts you a little higher, one jump at a time, until you hit a hard ceiling where the engine crashes you back down. This is a patch-specific behaviour and it will not behave identically elsewhere.

Void ranging

Levitate into a corner or a sloped passage until you reach the void, then save. Levitate outside the dungeon and reload, and you drop in wherever you saved. Do not recall while falling, because that kills your character. Cast Levitate first, always. If you are going to range a dungeon this way, read our dungeon guide so you know what you are dropping into.

Horse indoors

You can bring a horse inside a building using the Recall anchor. You cannot dismount indoors, so plan your exit before you ride in.

Skywriting

Drop treasure piles onto the ground to write a message. The writing resets when you leave a town or a dungeon, so do it at your ship, where it persists.

Ships go wrong

Ships are the least stable part of Daggerfall and the bug list is long. Entering or exiting without moving can corrupt terrain or saves. Loading a save made on a ship can spawn swamp plants on open water. The small ship's rear corner has a hole that falls through to the void. And attacking your own ship's door spawns guards who arrest you for Breaking and Entering, which is a genuine Dark Brotherhood entry trick because the reputation hit lands only in the uninhabited High Rock sea coast region.

Unverified community folklore

Plenty of "Daggerfall bugs" circulate online and have never been confirmed by anyone with a source. We are not going to repeat them as fact, because a page that mixes verified exploits with rumours is worse than no page at all.

Everything verified on this page is in the two tables above. If a technique is not there, assume it is folklore until someone shows you a save file or a patch reference.

The remake caveat

Everything described so far is retail-game and DOS-era behaviour. If you are playing in a browser or on a modern community remake, expect these not to work. That is not a quality judgement about any particular project; it is simply that a 1996 config file, a DOS keyboard handler and a set of engine bugs have no reason to exist in a reimplementation.

Console-free is not automatically true of reimplementations either, so do not assume this page applies in either direction. Check what your version actually supports. For the unpatched game itself and a clean start, our beginners guide is the right place to begin, and none of it requires turning cheat mode on.

Cheats questions

If your aim is a clean first playthrough rather than a mechanics tour, skip this page and start with the beginners guide. Cheat mode gives you money and speed, not comprehension, and the exploits on this page are far more satisfying once you already know how the game works.