My head keeps falling off. What can I do?

Question

I have an… unusual problem.

What? How'd it happen? No, no, that isn't impor— Okay, fine. It might have something to do with the tim command, a bandit chieftan, and an accident with an ebony greatsword. But that's all you're getting out of me!

Now where was I? Ah, yes. Wherever I go, my head seems to be a few steps behind me, catching up at odd intervals only to be left behind again. I just stopped to mine a corundum deposit, and my head fell to the ground and started rolling down the mountain! Very embarrassing.

How can I fix this? I was actually wandering around without any head at all for a while, but was able to restore it by sexchangeing twice. Sadly, it doesn't appear to have been bolted on properly when it reappeared. I can't even hide my deformity with a hat!

I'm making my medical records available to anyone wishing to study my condition.

Answer 1

When you get killed by a decapitating strike, a flag gets set in the game state to denote that an animation should be played showing that you got decapitated. Upon loading the game; the animation of the body appears to be overridden by another animation (eg. your character wobbles even though your standing still), so the flag does not affect the body part. However, it does affect the head...

I see two ways to get rid of this annoying stuck flag:

1. Get someone to do a decapitating strike on you without being in immortal mode.

   If lucky, the flag is removed upon death. If unlucky, it just adds and removes a second flag...

   Update:
   The above fix won't work, once you get killed it will just reload the save game again. In a similar vein the other fixes mentioned in this question (and elsewhere) do not work because they do not clear the flag from the save game. Editing the save game seems to be a necessity to fix this.

2. Get two save games, the one right before and after the incident. It might be more feasible to try to reproduce this and get two save games in which there are less changes...

   Then, use Notepad++ to do a regular expression replace to change :: into \n.

   Now you can use WinDiff and set it to show right-only lines. If done properly the amount of changes would be minimal and if you look at the lines containing _var variables you could easily figure out which flag affects this. Replacing one character should yield the flag invalid, do however not add/remove characters as that might break the file.

Answer 2

Have you tried werewolf transforming? That seems to re-initalize your body/race.

At the very last resort, you could do showracemenu and change nothing, but that has side-effects.

Answer 3

I've got the same problem and I posted about this on the Bethesda Forums about a week ago. There a kindly young chap dropped me with some wisdom, although not entirely helpful, it was a piece of the puzzle. He claimed that this problem had been posted before, and said the sexchange was necessary, but that I also needed to 'remove gory neck graphic'.

He said this problem can be fixed in console by typing in the following:

sexchange
sexchange
player.removeitem 000DB5D0 1
sexchange
sexchange

Answer 4

Change into a werewolf then change back!

Use these console commands to gain the werewolf abilities if you haven't gotten them in game yet.

player.addspell 00092c48
player.addspell 000a1a3e

Change then change back. Once you are done use these console commands to go back to normal.

player.removespell 00092c48
player.removespell 000a1a3e

Just don't do it in town or near anyone else!

Answer 5

Based on your comments, tim = toggle immortal mode. A thief and an ebony broadsword. Did you die and then make yourself immortal or something? If that's the case, maybe you're still dead? Have you tried resurrecting yourself? Might try player.resurrect. But I'm just guessing what's going on here. Pure guess. Nothing concrete to back it up. Mostly cause my head is still attached.