EU5 Country Tags and Location IDs Guide

Here is the failure almost everyone hits first. The console is open, the command is real, you typed it carefully — and nothing happens, or the console throws an error. The command was fine. The target was wrong. You handed it a country name when it wanted a tag, or a country tag when it wanted a location ID, or the on-screen religion name when it wanted the faith's internal key. EU5 is strict about this in a way that feels unfriendly until you understand the design: the game does not parse your intent, it matches an exact internal string against its data.

This page gives you the mental model that makes every command and every mod file predictable. First the two identifier systems and the one rule that governs both. Then what country tags and location IDs actually are and where they live. Then the practical skill that replaces memorization — reading any identifier off the live game in seconds. Then a command reference, a modding walkthrough, and a troubleshooting loop for when a target still won't take.

Two Identifier Systems, One Rule

EU5 keeps two parallel ledgers of names, and they never overlap. Get this split into your head first and the rest of the article is just detail.

Country tags name nations. Every country that exists on the map — playable, released, or formable — carries a short letter code. France is FRA, Austria is HAB. These codes are what nation-targeted commands consume: switching the country you play, annexing a rival, declaring war, forcing a personal union, or telling an AI to forget its plans. If a command acts on a who, it wants a country tag.

Location identifiers name places. Every tile of the map — what EU5 calls a location, and what EU4 players will remember as a province — has its own identifier. This one comes in two forms that point at the same tile. The location ID is a number, the form the console uses: population 7273 10000 or win_siege 1219. The location key is a lowercase written name, the form the data files use. If a command acts on a where, it wants a location identifier.

Now the rule that explains every confusing failure. The engine matches internal names, never display names. The text the game draws on your screen — "France", "Catholic", "Renaissance" — is a localization layer sitting on top of the real data. Commands and scripts talk to the layer underneath. That is why:

• You type tag FRA, not tag France. The tag is the real name; "France" is a costume.
• A religion command wants the faith's internal key, so religion bon works while religion buddhist fails outright — "Buddhist" is the display label, bon is the key the data actually defines.
• Location keys are plain lowercase words, because that is how the map files name things, regardless of what the province tooltip calls them in your language.

Two more principles fall out of this and are worth installing now.

You read identifiers; you do not remember them. The set of country tags is large, the set of location IDs runs into the thousands, and both grow as content is added. Nobody carries them in their head. The skill is knowing where each one is printed — the debug overlay for tags, the debug tooltip for location IDs, the data folders for internal keys — and looking it up in five seconds. Treat any guide that hands you a giant static list as a convenience, not as the lesson.

Identity is defined once and referenced everywhere. A country tag is declared in the country's setup entry, and every other system — map colors, localization, diplomacy — hangs off that one code. A location's identity is its name bound to a unique color in the map definitions, and the hierarchy, terrain template, and population all reference that name. When something breaks, you are almost always tracing back to a single point of definition. Knowing where that point is beats knowing any individual value.

Country Tags: What They Are, Where They Live

A country tag is a compact letter code — three characters for the vast majority of vanilla nations, and up to five where a modder wants a new tag that cannot be confused with an existing one. Three letters keeps things terse; five letters buys you distance from the vanilla pool, so a modded country tagged DOWNT can never collide with a shipped one like BTI. Tags are written in capitals by convention and carry no spaces or underscores.

For a player, the tag is simply the argument you type after a nation command. For a modder, the tag is the spine of the whole country: it is the key that the setup files, the map color, and the localized display name all attach to. Change the tag in one place and miss it in another and the country silently misbehaves — which is exactly why the modding rule is to copy-paste the code between files rather than ever retyping it.

Where a country lives in the data, for when you need to look under the hood:

File / folder	What it holds for a country
main_menu/setup/start/10_countries	The game-start / bookmark entry: government type, capital (a lowercase location key), owned and cored locations, discovered regions.
in_game/setup/countries/	The in-game country definitions, split into regional files. A new tag must be added here and in the start file above — they are separate systems.
map/colors	The country's map color, optionally as a named RGB value you can reference by name elsewhere.
main_menu/localization/<language>/	The display name shown in-game. This is the costume; the tag underneath is what the engine uses.

A few tags are worth recognizing on sight, because they turn up constantly in examples and in other guides. Treat this as a reading aid, not a list to learn — the debug overlay gives you the authoritative tag for any country in your actual save.

Tag	Country	Tag	Country
FRA	France	HAB	Austria (Habsburg)
CAS	Castile	ENG	England
TUR	Ottomans	POR	Portugal
ARA	Aragon	NAP	Naples
VEN	Venice	BYZ	Byzantium
POL	Poland	SWE	Sweden

Location IDs and Location Keys: The Map's Real Names

Start with the vocabulary correction that saves the most confusion: EU5 calls its map tiles locations, not provinces. "Province" still exists in the game, but it is now a grouping label one level up, alongside area, region, subcontinent, and continent. These are tier titles in a hierarchy, not the tile itself. When an EU4 veteran says "province ID" they usually mean what EU5 calls a location ID — and the two games do not share the same numbers, because EU5 built a new map.

The hierarchy, from the tile upward, looks like this:

location → province → area → region → subcontinent → continent

A location is the atomic unit you zoom into and click on. Locations roll up into a province, provinces into an area, areas into a region, and so on. Some commands and effects target a single location; others target a whole province, area, or region. Knowing which tier a command expects is half of using it correctly — conquering a province and occupying a location are not the same operation.

Each location carries its identity in two coupled forms. The location ID is the number the console and the debug tooltip use — the argument for commands like population, win_siege, and core. The location key is the lowercase written name used inside the data files, and in the mod files that name is bound one-to-one to a unique hex color. Paint a region of the map a specific color, bind that color to a name in the definitions, and the engine resolves the color under your cursor into that name and then into everything attached to it — terrain, climate, population. The color is the bridge between the picture of the map and the data behind it.

This is why the location side has more moving parts than the country side, and why modders treat the name-and-color binding as sacred: break it and the engine cannot match a painted pixel to a definition. For a player, the practical takeaway is simpler — you will almost always use the numeric location ID, read it off the tooltip, and never touch the key unless you are editing files.

How to Read Any Identifier In-Game

This is the section that replaces every static list you will ever find. Both identifiers are printed by the game itself once debug mode is on, and reading them takes seconds.

Turn on debug mode. It is a Steam launch option, not an in-game setting: right-click the game in your library, open Properties, and add the debug-mode flag under Launch Options. The test that it worked is that the console key — the key left of 1 — now opens a console. If the console does not open, the flag is not active; the debug mode setup guide covers the exact flag spelling and the common reasons it fails to take.

Read a country tag. With debug mode active, hover the cursor over any country on the map. The debug overlay renders that nation's metadata, and one line reads tag = FRA (or whatever the code is). That is the value you feed into nation commands. No list, no lookup — the country tells you its own name.

Read a location ID. This one needs a second switch flipped. Open Settings, go to User Interface, and turn Map Tooltips on. Now zoom in and hover a province: the debug tooltip paints a purple overlay that includes the location's numeric ID and extra region data. That number is the argument for location commands. If you see the purple box but no ID, tooltips are still off.

Discover the commands themselves. You do not need to memorize the command list either. Type helplog in the console and the game writes the full, current command reference to a text file inside the Europa Universalis V folder under your Documents. That file is the authoritative list for your exact build — far more reliable than any screenshot or wiki page, because it is generated by the game you are actually running. Tab autocomplete in the console is the fast way to confirm a command's spelling and expected argument as you type.

The whole workflow is a loop: hover to read the identifier, check the command's expected target with help or helplog, type the command with the identifier you just read. Once that loop is muscle memory, you are independent of every guide, including this one.

Which Commands Take Which Target

With the two systems in mind, the command list stops being a wall and sorts itself into two columns: commands that act on a who take a country tag, and commands that act on a where take a location identifier. A third small group wants an internal data key rather than either.

Command	Target type	Example	What it does
tag	Country tag	tag FRA	Switch the country you are playing.
nex	Country tag	nex HAB	Annex a country (territory arrives integrated, not fully cored).
war	Country tag	war MVA	Declare war on a nation directly.
waronplayer	Country tag	waronplayer HAL	Make that AI nation declare war on you.
form_union	Country tag	form_union FRA	Create a personal union with you as senior partner.
add_favor	Country tag + amount	add_favor FRA 50	Make that country owe you favors.
clear_ai_objectives	Country tag	clear_ai_objectives FRA	Make that AI forget its plans and re-evaluate.
population	Location ID + value	population 7273 10000	Add population to a location (value is in thousands).
win_siege	Location ID	win_siege 1219	Instantly win the active siege at a location.
core	Location ID	core 1219	Core a specific location.
weather	Location name + type	weather Grimby tornado	Spawn a weather event at a location.
religion	Internal faith key	religion bon	Change religion using the data-file key, not the display name.
add_institution_progress	Institution key + location + %	Renaissance + location + 100	Start or advance an institution at a location.

Two habits will keep you out of trouble here. First, when a command misfires, suspect the target type before you suspect the command — a nation command fed a location ID fails silently or with a cryptic error, and the fix is just reading the right identifier. Second, watch the scaling on numeric arguments: population counts in thousands, so a value of 1 means one thousand people, and some stats clamp to a cap rather than adding literally — stability, for instance, tops out and ignores anything you pile on past the ceiling. When a number behaves oddly, the answer is in the game's own behavior, not in a fixed table; test it on a throwaway save.

For the complete catalog with every argument and toggle, use the EU5 console commands and cheats list. The identifiers on this page are what make that list usable.

Using Tags and IDs in Mods

If you are adding content rather than just typing commands, the same identifiers become things you define instead of things you read. The working method is unglamorous and it is the whole secret: modding EU5 is mostly copying a working example and renaming it. Find a vanilla country or location that resembles what you want, copy its entries across every file that references it, and adjust. You do not need to understand the full system before you start — you need one correct template and the discipline to change the identifier consistently everywhere it appears.

Adding a country tag. Copy the setup entry of a similar country and work through the four touch points from earlier: the in-game country file, the start/bookmark file, the map color, and the localization entry. Three rules prevent the classic failures:

• Rename your mod files; keep the folder names. A mod file whose path and name match a vanilla file replaces it entirely, silently deleting the vanilla country and breaking compatibility with other mods. Folder names, by contrast, must mirror vanilla exactly. Files are flexible; folders are structural.
• Update both setup locations. The start file and the in-game country file are separate systems. Add the tag to only one and the country appears half-formed. While you are in the start entry, replace the copied country's capital and owned-location list with your own — leaving the source country's locations in place hands your new nation the wrong land.
• Never hand-type a tag code. Copy-paste it between files every single time. A transposed letter produces no error and a country that quietly malfunctions, and debugging that is miserable. This is the single most repeated piece of advice in country modding for a reason.

Adding locations. A new location needs its name bound to a unique color, then a handful of files that hang off that name: the definitions file that slots it into the continent → province hierarchy, a terrain/climate template, and a population entry. The minimum to make the game recognize and draw a location is about three files; population, culture, and resources take a couple more. The practical recipe is to copy an existing location's lines in each file and paste them for yours, then refine later. Two engine constraints are non-negotiable:

• The map image must be pixel-perfect. The parser treats every distinct color, every transparent pixel, and every soft anti-aliased edge as its own location. Paint with a hard pencil at full opacity in flat solid colors, export as 8-bit RGB with no alpha channel and no leftover layers, or the game will spawn hundreds of phantom locations — or fail to boot at all.
• Names are plain ASCII. An accented or special character in a location name crashes EU5 outright. EU4 forgave this with a blank space; EU5 does not. Keep names lowercase and unaccented, and script any pretty display text through localization later.

The governing philosophy is to get the game running first and make it pretty second. Copy placeholder climate, population, and resources so the location boots, confirm it appears on the map, and only then refine the details. When the error log names a broken location, its name maps to a color in the definitions — draw that color anywhere in your image editor, select by color, and the offending pixels light up. That loop turns "the game crashed" into "there is a stray pixel here" in under a minute.

Why a Tag or ID Fails, and How to Debug It

When a target won't take, it is almost always one of a short list of causes. Work down it before you assume the command is broken.

Wrong target type. The most common failure by far. You gave a nation command a location ID, or a location command a country tag, or typed a country's display name where a tag was required. Re-read the tooltip, confirm whether the command wants a who or a where, and supply the matching identifier.

Display name instead of internal key. The engine matches the real data key, not the screen label. religion buddhist fails; religion bon works. The same applies to institutions and other data-driven values — the working key lives in the game's common data folders, and you open the relevant file to read it rather than guessing the English word.

A hand-typed typo. If you retyped a tag or key instead of copying it, a single transposed character will pass without an error and simply not match anything. Copy the identifier fresh from the tooltip or file and paste it.

The country does not exist yet. Formable and releasable nations have tags, but a tag for a country that is not currently on the map has nothing to target. Form or release the country first, then read its tag from the live overlay.

The command changed between builds. Command names, exact syntax, and numeric caps move between updates, so a command that worked in a video from last year may be renamed or reworked now. This is precisely why helplog matters: it prints the command list for the build you are running, so you confirm against reality instead of against a guide. The identifiers themselves — tags and location IDs — are stable data; the commands that consume them are the volatile part.

The debugging loop that resolves nearly everything: read the identifier off the debug tooltip rather than trusting memory; confirm the command and its expected argument with help or helplog; for mod crashes, follow the error log to the named location, map that name to its color, and select-by-color to find the bad pixels. If the console itself will not open or a command still refuses, the console commands not working guide covers the setup failures that sit upstream of any identifier.

FAQ

Next Reads

• How to Enable Debug Mode in EU5 — the exact launch flag and fixes when the console will not open.
• EU5 Console Commands and Cheats List — the full command catalog that these identifiers feed into.
• EU5 Console Commands Not Working — troubleshooting for setup failures upstream of any target.
• EU5 Best Starter Nations — put a country tag to use with a recommended first campaign.
• EU5 Beginner Guide: First 50 Years — the opening checklist for any nation.
• HOI4 Country Tags Guide — the same concept in Hearts of Iron 4, if you play across Paradox titles.
• Stellaris Debug Tooltip IDs Guide and Stellaris IDs List — reading identifiers off the game in Stellaris.