Can't complete Vivec Informants quest: Progress of Truth Book is the issue

I've come to an issue, I've done everything for this quest but Caius has no dialog option, I went to him after talking to all 3, and he said something about needing to get the book Progress of Truth, I do that, and now theres no option to complete the quest. He asks if Im there about orders, but there is no topic on it. The quest is still active.

Now I did sell the paper that is his orders in the mean time, could this be it? I also can't find it, as far as I can remember there are only two merchants I've used lately and neither of them have the orders.

Update: I don't think its the note about the mission, I added it through console commands, still can't advance the dialog at all

Update 2: if I drop Progress of Truth, I can talk to him about my Orders and that I need to get the book, but when I drop the book, the orders option goes away and there is no dialog option that advances the plot

Last edited by ACardAttack on 28 Aug 2016 - 12:39.

Hi,

I looked at through the quest/dialog scripts for your issue. In order to get the "Orders" dialog from Caius so that he accepts the Progress of Truth book, the following conditions need to be met:

1. Quest stage for Vivec Informants (fbmwMQ04) must be exactly 1. (...Caius gave me instructions in writing)
2. Quest stage for Milo Informant (fbmwMQ04a) must be >= 50 (...Mehra Milo says I must get a copy of 'Progress of Truth' to give to the Spymaster.)
3. Quest stage for Addhiranirr Informant fbmwMQ04b) must be >= 45
4. Quest stage for Huleeya Informant (fbmwMQ04c) must be >= 50 (...Nerevarine cult is tied up with ancient grievances between the Ashlanders and the Great Houses.)
5. You must have 1 or more copies of 'Progress of Truth' in your inventory
6. You must have exactly 1 copy of 'Notes from Huleeya' (0bkUa1U7huleeyainformant) in your inventory

If you are not at a high enough stage in the subquests or missing any of the above items, you won't get the dialog. If you are certain you've met all of the above requirements but something is not right, then you can try manually advancing to the next quest. Type 'Player.SetStage fbmwMQ04 50' into the console and talk to Caius. As long as the 'Ashlander Informant' quest (fbmwMQ05) is not started (quest stage < 1), you should get an 'Orders' dialog option from Caius to let you advance to that quest.

Thanks that worked!

Where did you find those numbers? I know where to find the quest ID, but howd you know 50? (In case I need to do this in the future)

The quest logic is actually

The quest logic is actually tied into the dialog logic. Here are the steps to find the quest dialog, required quest conditions and a very short explanation of how it works:

From the Oblivion CS, select menu "Character->Quests...".
Select the Vivec Informants quest (fbmwMQ04) in the far left quest list.
Select "Topics" in the row of buttons across the top.
A list of Dialog Topics appears to the right of the Quest list panel. These correspond to the dialog options you can select in game.
Select "1Orders" in the Topic List and a list of Dialog Responses to each topic appears in a panel to the top right of the Topic list.
In the Dialog Response list, look in the column labeled "NPC" and select a topic by the NPC/quest giver (in this case, Caius Cosades).
The panels in the lower right corner now populate with information which is tied to the selected dialog response.
At the bottom right, you see a panel labeled "Conditions". In order for you to get a dialog topic to appear in game, the conditions below must be satisfied for one of the dialog responses to that topic. In other words, Caius will not give you the option to ask him about "Orders" until the conditions are met for one of the responses to that topic.
There is also a panel directly above the Conditions list labeled "Result Script". These are a list of commands that the game runs when the selected dialog response is spoken. Some quests use this to advance quest logic, some use a separate quest script, and some use both.

In order to figure out which dialog response is tied to which stage, it is helpful to be familiar with the dialog spoken and the actions that are performed at each stage -- I use the quest references at uesp.net. It can get frustrating trying to figure out how quests are advanced unless you have a lot of patience. The keywords to look for are "GetStage", "SetStage" and "Addtopic" which can be found in the Conditions and Result Script sections. Dialog topics can also be added by dialog response through the "Add Topics" panel which is on the far right of the response details list.