You’ve just poured three hours into your Skyrim playthrough when it hits you: your character’s face looks absolutely terrible. Maybe the dungeon lighting hid how lopsided those cheekbones really are, or you’re having second thoughts about that Nord warrior and want to pivot to a Khajiit stealth build instead. Rather than starting over and losing all that progress, there’s a faster solution, the racemenu command.
This console command gives players the power to reopen character creation at any point during their game, letting them tweak everything from race and appearance to name and gender. It’s one of the most useful tools in Skyrim’s console arsenal, but it comes with quirks, potential pitfalls, and some critical differences between the vanilla command and the popular RaceMenu mod. Whether you’re on your first playthrough or your hundredth, understanding how to use this command properly can save you hours of frustration and help you create the character you actually want to play.
Key Takeaways
- The Skyrim RaceMenu command (showracemenu) allows players to reopen character creation at any point during gameplay to fix appearance mistakes or change race and gender without restarting.
- Always save your game before using the Skyrim race menu command, as changes are permanent once you select Done—use manual saves, not quicksaves, to ensure you have a reliable restore point.
- Changing your character’s race mid-playthrough swaps your racial passive abilities and powers, but keeps skill bonuses you’ve already earned, which advanced players can exploit for unique builds.
- Never change your character’s name through the RaceMenu interface as it can break quest scripts, especially in the Dark Brotherhood questline; use the player.setname console command instead.
- The RaceMenu mod greatly expands customization options beyond vanilla Skyrim with hundreds of adjustable parameters, preset saving, and sculpt mode, but requires SKSE (Skyrim Script Extender) to function.
- Common bugs after using RaceMenu include the ‘gray face bug’ (texture mismatch) and disappeared quest markers, which can usually be fixed by reloading a save or fast traveling to another location.
What Is the Skyrim Racemenu Command?
The racemenu command is a console command in Skyrim that reopens the character creation screen at any point during gameplay. It’s available on PC versions of both Skyrim Legendary Edition and Skyrim Special Edition, giving players full access to the same customization options they had when first starting the game.
When executed, this command brings up the familiar character editor interface where players can modify their character’s race, gender, appearance, and name. It’s particularly valuable for fixing character creation mistakes or adapting your character to match a new playstyle without rolling a completely new save file.
Understanding the Console Command Syntax
The syntax for the racemenu command is straightforward: open the console and type showracemenu (without any additional parameters or arguments). That’s it. No complex modifiers, no numerical values to remember.
The console in Skyrim doesn’t require precise capitalization, ShowRaceMenu, showracemenu, or SHOWRACEMENU all work identically. The game processes console commands regardless of case, which makes entering them quickly during gameplay much easier.
One critical detail: you don’t need to include quotation marks, brackets, or any other special characters. Just the command itself. Adding extra syntax will cause the command to fail or produce unexpected results.
Racemenu vs. Showracemenu: Key Differences Explained
Here’s where things get slightly confusing for newcomers: racemenu and showracemenu are actually the same command in vanilla Skyrim. Both trigger the exact same function and open the character creation menu.
The reason both versions exist comes down to how Bethesda’s console command system handles abbreviations. Many console commands in Skyrim accept shortened versions, showracemenu is the full command, while racemenu functions as an accepted shorthand. Either one gets the job done.
But, when modders created the enhanced RaceMenu mod (which we’ll cover in detail later), they specifically tied their expanded features to the showracemenu command. This means if you’re running the mod, you’ll want to use the full command to access all the additional customization options. Players using vanilla Skyrim can stick with whichever version they prefer.
How to Open and Use the Racemenu Command
Executing the racemenu command requires access to Skyrim’s developer console, which is only available on PC. Console players on PlayStation or Xbox don’t have access to this functionality in the base game, though mods on Xbox Series X
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S and PlayStation platforms may offer alternative character editing options.
Accessing the Console in Skyrim
Opening the console on PC is simple: press the tilde key (~), located just below the Escape key on most US keyboard layouts. On UK or international keyboards, the key might be in a different position or require pressing a different key entirely, try the grave accent key or check your keyboard layout.
When the console opens successfully, the game will pause and the screen will dim slightly. A cursor will appear at the bottom of the screen with a blinking text input line. The game world essentially freezes while the console is active, so you don’t need to worry about getting attacked mid-command.
If the tilde key doesn’t work, your keyboard layout might not be set to US English in Windows. You can either change your keyboard settings temporarily or check which key corresponds to the tilde position on your specific layout.
Step-by-Step Command Entry Process
Once the console is open, the process is dead simple:
- Type showracemenu into the console command line
- Press Enter to execute the command
- The character creation menu will immediately appear, replacing the console interface
- Make whatever changes you want to your character’s appearance, race, or other attributes
- When finished, select Done to return to normal gameplay
The character creation interface works identically to how it functioned at the start of your game. All the same sliders, presets, and options are available. You can spend as much time as you need tweaking details, the game remains paused throughout the entire process.
One important note: as soon as you hit Done, your changes are saved permanently to your current save file. There’s no additional confirmation prompt. This is why backing up your save before using the skyrim race menu command is absolutely critical (more on that later).
Common Use Cases for the Racemenu Command
Players turn to the racemenu command for dozens of different reasons, but a few scenarios come up repeatedly in the Skyrim community. Understanding these common use cases helps illustrate just how versatile this tool can be.
Fixing Character Creation Mistakes
This is probably the number one reason players search for this command. Skyrim’s character creator has notoriously deceptive lighting, your character might look perfectly fine in the dimly lit character creation cave, then you step outside into Skyrim’s harsh daylight and realize their nose is the size of a small shield.
Many players spend their first few hours of gameplay slowly realizing they’re not happy with their character’s appearance. Rather than restarting and losing progress through Helgen and the early questlines, the showracemenu command lets you make adjustments on the fly. Popular modding resources like Nexus Mods also offer lighting fix mods specifically designed to prevent this issue in future playthroughs.
Facial feature tweaks are particularly common. That jawline that seemed fine at midnight? Might look absolutely ridiculous in the afternoon. The racemenu command gives you a second (or third, or tenth) chance to get things right.
Changing Your Race Mid-Playthrough
Sometimes players start with one build concept and decide halfway through they want to try something completely different. Maybe your Nord two-handed warrior playthrough is getting stale and you want to switch to a Dunmer destruction mage build instead.
The racemenu command makes this possible without starting over. You can change your character’s race entirely, which will adjust your racial passive abilities and starting skill bonuses. Keep in mind this doesn’t refund perk points you’ve already spent, those stay locked in your previous build, but it does let you adapt your character’s base stats and appearance to match a new direction.
This is particularly useful for players who want to experience different racial abilities without managing multiple save files. The differences between playing as an Argonian versus a High Elf can significantly impact gameplay, especially for magic-focused builds.
Adjusting Facial Features and Appearance
Beyond major overhauls, many players use the command for minor touch-ups. Adding a new scar after a particularly tough battle, changing hairstyles to match your character’s progression, or adjusting war paint to reflect allegiances can all enhance roleplaying immersion.
Some players treat their character’s appearance as an evolving element of their story. A character might start clean-shaven and well-groomed, then gradually adopt a more rugged appearance as they spend months in the wilderness. The racemenu command makes these narrative-driven changes possible without mods.
Important Warnings and Side Effects
Before you jump into the console and start experimenting, you need to understand the potential consequences. The racemenu command is powerful, but it can cause serious problems if used carelessly.
How Changing Race Affects Your Skills and Abilities
When you change your character’s race using showracemenu, Skyrim recalculates your racial bonuses and abilities based on your new selection. This sounds straightforward, but it creates some weird edge cases.
Each race in Skyrim provides specific starting skill bonuses. For example, Orcs get +10 to Heavy Armor, +5 to Enchanting, Block, Smithing, One-Handed, and Two-Handed. If you created an Orc and then switch to a Breton mid-game, you don’t lose those bonus skill levels, they’re baked into your character permanently.
But, racial passive abilities do change. If you were a Wood Elf benefiting from the 50% poison resistance and then switch to an Imperial, you’ll lose that resistance immediately. Your active racial power (like the Orc’s Berserker Rage) will also swap to match your new race.
This can create surprisingly powerful combinations. Some min-maxers intentionally start as races with strong starting skill bonuses for their planned build, level those skills, then switch to a different race with better endgame passive abilities. Whether this is clever optimization or exploitative cheese depends on your personal playstyle philosophy.
Potential Bugs and Glitches to Watch For
The racemenu command is generally stable, but it’s not without risks. Several well-documented bugs can occur, especially if you’re running a heavily modded game.
The most common issue is texture or mesh glitches after changing appearance. Sometimes character textures fail to reload properly, resulting in a gray or brown-faced character where the body texture doesn’t match the head. This is often referred to as the “gray face bug” and typically requires reloading a save to fix.
Another potential problem: quest markers can disappear or fail to update after using the command. This doesn’t happen consistently, but several players have reported quest objectives failing to advance properly after modifying their character mid-quest. Gaming publications like PC Gamer have documented similar issues in their Skyrim troubleshooting guides over the years.
Vampire or werewolf transformations can also conflict with racemenu changes. If you’re infected with vampirism or lycanthropy when you use the command, you might experience visual bugs or lose transformation abilities temporarily.
Why Changing Your Name Can Break Quests
Here’s the big one: do not change your character’s name using the racemenu interface unless you’re absolutely certain you know what you’re doing.
Many of Skyrim’s quests reference the player character by name in dialogue, quest scripts, and internal game variables. If you change your name mid-playthrough, these references can break. NPCs might continue calling you by your old name (which is just immersion-breaking), or worse, quest scripts that check for your character’s name might fail to trigger properly.
The most notorious example involves the Dark Brotherhood questline, which has several scripts tied to the player’s identity. Changing your name during this questline can cause progression issues or prevent certain dialogue options from appearing.
If you absolutely must change your name, use the player.setname console command instead. Type player.setname "NewName" with quotation marks around your desired name. This updates your character name in the game’s internal systems more cleanly than doing it through the racemenu interface.
The RaceMenu Mod: Enhanced Character Customization
When Skyrim modders talk about “RaceMenu,” they’re usually referring to a completely different beast than the vanilla console command. The RaceMenu mod by Expired is one of the most popular and enduring character customization tools in the Skyrim modding scene, available for both Legendary Edition and Special Edition.
What the RaceMenu Mod Adds Beyond the Vanilla Command
The RaceMenu mod transforms the basic character editor into a massively expanded customization suite. Where vanilla Skyrim gives you maybe a dozen sliders and some basic color options, RaceMenu provides hundreds of adjustable parameters.
Key features include:
- Body morphing sliders that let you adjust proportions beyond just the face
- Detailed texture overlays for scars, makeup, dirt, and other cosmetic details
- RGB color sliders for precise control over hair, eyes, skin tone, and war paint
- Preset saving and loading, so you can export character designs and share them with other players
- Real-time lighting controls within the editor itself, letting you preview your character under different conditions
- Sculpt mode for manipulating individual facial features with granular precision
The mod also fixes several bugs present in the vanilla racemenu command, including the infamous issue where changing your character’s weight would reset all your facial customizations. With the mod installed, these changes are tracked separately.
Advanced users can even add custom sliders and morphs through additional plugins, creating virtually unlimited customization potential. The modding community has built entire ecosystems around RaceMenu, with thousands of preset files and enhancement mods available.
How to Install and Configure RaceMenu
Installing RaceMenu follows the standard Skyrim modding process, but it does have specific requirements that trip up newcomers.
Prerequisites:
- SKSE (Skyrim Script Extender) is absolutely required. RaceMenu won’t function without it.
- A mod manager like Mod Organizer 2 or Vortex is highly recommended
- For Special Edition, you’ll need the Special Edition version of both SKSE and RaceMenu
Installation steps:
- Download and install SKSE following the instructions for your game version
- Download RaceMenu from your preferred modding platform
- Install RaceMenu through your mod manager, or manually extract it to your Skyrim Data folder
- Ensure RaceMenu loads after any other mods that modify races or character appearance
- Launch Skyrim through SKSE (not the standard launcher)
Once installed, you access RaceMenu the same way as the vanilla command, type showracemenu in the console. The difference is immediately obvious: instead of the basic character creator, you’ll see an expanded interface with tabs for different customization categories.
Configuration is handled through an MCM (Mod Configuration Menu) if you have SkyUI installed, or through INI files in the RaceMenu folder. You can adjust things like whether the command saves your current location when opened, control lighting presets, and manage how the mod handles certain race-specific features.
Best Practices and Pro Tips
After years of community experience with the racemenu command, certain best practices have emerged. Follow these guidelines to avoid the most common mistakes.
Always Save Your Game Before Using Racemenu
This cannot be stressed enough: make a hard save before opening showracemenu. Not a quicksave, not an autosave, a proper manual save with a descriptive name like “Before character edit.”
The reason is simple: once you hit Done in the character creator, those changes are permanent in your current save. If you accidentally change something you didn’t mean to, or if one of the bugs mentioned earlier occurs, your only rollback option is reloading a previous save.
Quicksaves and autosaves get overwritten too easily. A dedicated manual save gives you a guaranteed restore point if something goes wrong. This is especially important if you’re changing your race or making significant appearance alterations.
Some players maintain a rotation of “pre-racemenu” saves labeled with timestamps. It’s overkill for most situations, but if you’re experimenting with different looks or testing race changes, having multiple restore points can save hours of frustration.
Combining Racemenu with Other Console Commands
The racemenu command plays well with several other console commands, creating powerful combinations for character customization and fixing issues.
player.setrace [RaceID] is an alternative way to change race without opening the full character creator. This command changes your race instantly without modifying appearance. It’s useful if you want to swap racial abilities without altering how your character looks. Race IDs include BretonRace, NordRace, OrcRace, etc.
player.setscale [number] adjusts your character’s height. Vanilla Skyrim forces all player characters to the same height regardless of race (unlike NPCs, where races have different default heights). This command lets you make your character taller or shorter. A value of 1.0 is default: 1.1 makes you 10% taller, 0.9 makes you 10% shorter.
showlooksmenu player 1 is a lesser-known alternative that opens only the appearance customization portion of the racemenu without allowing race or name changes. This is safer if you only want to tweak facial features and don’t want to risk accidentally changing your race or triggering the name-related quest bugs.
For players following guides from sources like GamesRadar+, combining these commands with racemenu can help achieve specific character builds or fix issues that arise during complex questlines.
setnpcweight [value] adjusts your character’s weight slider (0-100) without opening racemenu at all. This is particularly useful in vanilla Skyrim where changing weight through racemenu could reset other appearance settings.
Troubleshooting Common Racemenu Issues
Even when you follow best practices, problems can still crop up. Here’s how to diagnose and fix the most frequent racemenu-related issues.
Console Won’t Open or Command Doesn’t Work
If pressing the tilde key does nothing, several factors might be at fault:
Keyboard layout conflicts are the most common culprit. If you’re using a non-US keyboard layout, the tilde key might be mapped differently. Try these alternatives:
- On UK keyboards, try the key to the left of 1
- On some European layouts, try ö, ä, or §
- German keyboards often use ^ or ´
If you still can’t find the right key, you can change your Windows keyboard layout temporarily to US English, launch Skyrim, then switch back after you’re done.
INI file restrictions can disable the console entirely. Open your Skyrim.ini file (usually located in Documents/My Games/Skyrim) and look for the line bAllowConsole=0 under [General]. Change the 0 to 1, save the file, and relaunch Skyrim.
Some mod managers or game launchers can override this setting, so you might need to configure it through your mod manager’s INI editor instead of editing the file directly.
If the console opens but the showracemenu command returns an error or does nothing, verify that you’re typing it correctly with no spaces except between words (though racemenu is one word). Also confirm you’re not accidentally including quotation marks or other special characters.
Character Appearance Resets or Looks Broken
The “gray face bug” or “brown face bug” is the most frustrating appearance issue players encounter after using racemenu.
This happens when there’s a mismatch between your character’s head texture and body texture, usually caused by mod conflicts or the game failing to load custom textures properly after the racemenu screen closes.
Immediate fixes:
- Reload your pre-racemenu save and try again
- Enter the console and type showracemenu again, then exit without making changes (sometimes this forces textures to reload)
- Try fast traveling to a different location, which can trigger texture reloads
Mod-related solutions:
- If you’re using appearance or texture mods, make sure they’re properly installed and active
- Check your load order, face texture mods need to load in the correct sequence
- Some race mods require special patches to work with racemenu: check the mod description pages
Appearance settings reset to default is another issue that occasionally occurs in vanilla Skyrim, particularly when changing the weight slider through racemenu. This was largely fixed in later patches, but if you’re playing an unpatched version, it can still happen.
The workaround: use the setnpcweight console command instead of changing weight through the racemenu interface. This bypasses the bug entirely while still letting you adjust your character’s body type.
If your character’s face becomes permanently stuck looking in one direction after using racemenu, this is typically a camera or animation bug. Exit to the main menu and reload your save, don’t just reload from the pause menu, as that doesn’t always reset animation states properly.
Conclusion
The racemenu command remains one of Skyrim’s most valuable console tools more than a decade after the game’s original release. Whether you’re fixing a character creation mistake, pivoting your build mid-playthrough, or just experimenting with different appearances for roleplay purposes, understanding how to use showracemenu properly gives you complete control over your character’s identity.
The key takeaways: always save before using the command, avoid changing your character’s name through the interface, and be aware that race changes affect your passive abilities and racial powers. For players willing to jump into modding, the RaceMenu mod expands these capabilities exponentially, offering customization depth that rivals dedicated character creators in modern RPGs.
With the right precautions and a basic understanding of the potential pitfalls, the skyrim race menu command becomes a reliable tool for keeping your character exactly how you want them, without the need to restart your playthrough every time you spot something you want to change.
