HoI4 Special Projects Console Commands Guide

Most players open the console, type sp_instant, see nothing happen, and assume the command is broken. It is not. Special projects are not a technology you click — they are a pipeline. An experimental facility generates breakthrough points, breakthrough points feed a project, and a scientist runs the whole operation. sp_instant only completes a project that is already underway, and nearly every "this cheat doesn't work" story online comes from someone aiming at the project when they should have been aiming at the pipeline.

Get the pipeline into your head first and every command below behaves exactly the way you expect. Everything here works in a normal, non-Ironman game. Achievement runs are out of the question: Ironman blocks the console entirely, which is the entire point of Ironman. If you are here to test a division template before committing to it in a real campaign, to sandbox a superweapon, or simply to see what is hiding behind the research tab, you are in the right place.

How Special Projects Are Gated

Special projects are the keystone research layer added with the Götterdämmerung expansion: the game's formal way of letting you race toward superweapons. Land cruisers, the Project Habakkuk ice carrier, bouncing bombs, the Schwerer Gustav-class railway gun, helicopters, jet engines, and the entire rocket and nuclear programs all live here now. Rockets are even constructed like regular military equipment, and V-2-style ballistic missiles fly a mission type that anti-air cannot touch. The system replaces a handful of old tech-tree dead ends, and it opens cruisers and submarines to every nation willing to invest, not just the historical naval powers.

Between you and any of that stand exactly three gates. Understand the three gates and you understand both the system and every cheat that targets it.

Gate one: an experimental facility. Facilities are a new building type that appears physically on the map. You can build one per state, the state needs sufficient supply, and a naval engineering facility additionally needs a coastal tile. Most facility types run around twelve thousand construction; the physics facility costs more, around fifteen thousand — your construction tab shows the exact figure for your version of the game, and that number is the one to trust. You can build duplicates of the same type, but the cost scales exponentially, so you generally should not. Placement is a strategic decision, not an afterthought: enemies who capture or raid a facility gain progress toward your projects, which means facilities belong in depth, not on the front line. The UK, the US, and Germany start with a handful of facilities; most other nations start with none.

Gate two: breakthrough points in the right field. Points accrue per specialization — land, air, naval, and nuclear — and every project draws on its field's pool, with expensive projects costing several points' worth. The fastest way to earn them is researching related technologies: the research tab marks contributing techs with color-coded notches, green for land, red for air, blue for naval, yellow for physics. A scientist assigned to an idle facility does basic research and generates points the slow way, and some national focuses grant points directly. Two habits fall out of this economy. First, start relevant techs early even when you do not need them yet, because points accrue daily. Second, banking points while nothing urgent needs researching is a legitimate strategy when you are saving for an expensive project. One warning: a facility in a region that runs out of supply does not merely slow down — it actively loses research progress.

Gate three: an assigned scientist. Recruiting costs one hundred political power and gives you one candidate per category. Each scientist level contributes a small amount of daily breakthrough progress plus a two-percent research bonus per level, up to level five, the Mastermind rank. Traits matter: Genius tops the list, then Brilliant Theorist, then the Expert and Specialist tiers, with Fast Learner valuable mainly on a young scientist you plan to level quickly and reassign. Stacking scientists in one facility hits steep diminishing returns — the second contributes half, the third a quarter, the fourth an eighth — so spreading scientists across facility types beats crowding them. And the single most common self-inflicted wound in this system: a facility with no scientist assigned produces absolutely nothing. It is an expensive decoration until someone moves in.

That is the whole machine. Facility, points, scientist — and every console command that follows is simply a lever on one of those three gates, or a shortcut straight past all of them.

Opening the Console and Finding Every Command

Press the tilde key, ~, just below Escape and left of the 1 key. If nothing happens, you are in an Ironman game — the console does not exist there, by design. In a normal game you get a command line with two features that do most of the work for you: the up and down arrows cycle through everything you have typed before, and Tab autocompletes after even a single character. Type sp_, hit Tab, and the game lists every special-project command it knows.

That autocomplete is the most important skill on this page, more valuable than any command list, including this one. Patches rename things, expansions add commands, and mods register their own specializations and projects. Your build's own command list is the only reference that is always current, so make it a habit to verify against it rather than against any website. Three tools do the job:

• Tab autocomplete. Type a prefix like sp_ and press Tab to see every matching command in your exact build.
• help plus a command name. Prints that command's accepted arguments straight into the console, so you never have to guess a syntax.
• helplog. Dumps the full command list of your build into the game's log file. When something from an old guide does nothing, this is how you find out what it was renamed to.

Two general commands earn a permanent place in your muscle memory while working with special projects. tdebug makes every province and state reveal its ID when you hover over it — those IDs are the inputs for half the map-related commands in the game. And tag followed by a country tag switches your control to that nation, which lets you test how another power's facility network and project options feel without starting a new campaign. If you do not know a country's tag off hand, tdebug shows that too.

Special Projects Command Table

The dedicated commands split into three families, and naming them makes the table easier to memorize than it looks. Gate-removers open projects you have not qualified for. Accelerators skip time. Staffing commands give you scientists. One command, sp_research_all, just does everything at once and belongs in a category of its own.

Command	What it does	Details worth knowing
sp_unlock_all	Makes every special project visible and available.	Ignores prerequisite research, triggers, and parent projects. The blunt instrument of the two unlock commands.
sp_available	Unlocks or re-locks projects whose research prerequisites are unmet.	Lets you start, for example, nuclear projects without researching Atomic Research first. Narrower than sp_unlock_all.
sp_instant	Autocompletes the current special project.	Only affects a project already in progress. The number-one cause of "the command did nothing."
sp_fast	Skips the prototyping stage and advances the iteration stage.	For when you want the project to move fast but still want to see its phase structure and rewards play out.
sp_breakthrough [number] [specialization]	Adds breakthrough points.	Alias sp_br. Example: sp_br 20 specialization_land. Without a specialization argument it adds points for all facilities. Valid fields: specialization_land, specialization_air, specialization_naval, specialization_nuclear.
sp_research_all	Researches every special project.	Alias sp_ra. If no scientist exists it creates one; otherwise it picks an arbitrary one. The grand-tour command.
sp_prototype_reward	Triggers a specified prototype reward during a project.	Lets you sample a project's mid-run payoff without waiting for the phase that grants it.
sp_add_scientist [level] [specialization]	Adds a scientist.	Both arguments are optional. Example: sp_add_scientist 1.
sp_add_mastermind	Adds a scientist with max skill and every specialization.	The no-arguments way to staff anything perfectly.
sp_set_selected_scientist_level [level]	Sets the selected scientist's level.	Level five is the Mastermind cap in a normal game.
sp_add_selected_scientist_trait [trait]	Adds a trait to the selected scientist.	Example: sp_add_selected_scientist_trait scientist_trait_brilliant_theorist. The facility view with the scientist assigned must be open, or the command silently does nothing. Trait names live in common\scientist_traits if you want the full menu.

Two pairs of commands get confused constantly, so settle them now. sp_instant finishes the one project you have started; sp_research_all finishes everything whether you started it or not. And sp_available only waives research prerequisites, while sp_unlock_all ignores everything — triggers, parents, all of it — and keeps every project permanently visible. For selective testing, sp_available plus a started project is the surgical tool. For "show me the whole toy box," sp_unlock_all is the door.

Around the dedicated commands sits a supporting cast that makes special-project testing smoother:

Command	Use it for
ic (instant construction)	Building facilities instantly. Toggle on, build, toggle off — the AI builds instantly too while it is active.
pp [amount]	Political power to recruit scientists the legitimate way, at one hundred PP per recruit.
research all / research [slot]	Regular tech. Remember that researching related techs also feeds breakthrough points, so this doubles as slow-motion sp_breakthrough.
research_on_icon_click (roic)	Click-to-research in the tech tree, ignoring prerequisites. The surgical alternative to research all.
toggle_hidden_techs (tht)	Reveals hidden technologies in the tree, including project-gated ones.
tag [country tag]	Switching control to another nation to test its facilities and project options.
tdebug	Revealing province, state, and country-tag IDs on hover.
observe	Spectator mode. Select a country while observing and you can take it over.
xp [amount]	Service experience to design and refine the divisions and ships your new project unlocks.

Breakthrough Points: The Currency Behind Every Project

Breakthrough points are the currency the whole system runs on, and they are the gate most players actually stall at. Facilities and scientists are one-time setup; points are a flow you manage for the entire war. The console can mint them freely, but knowing how the legitimate economy works is what lets you judge when a project is genuinely affordable in a real game — and when you are about to bankrupt a research program for a toy.

The legitimate economy has three income streams, in order of speed. Researching related technologies is the fastest: every tech carrying a colored notch contributes daily progress toward its field's points, which is why strong research nations snowball their special projects without trying. A scientist conducting basic research in an idle facility is the slow, steady drip — each scientist level adds a small fixed amount of daily progress, and the facility panel displays your exact current rate, so read it there rather than trusting any printed number. National focuses are the third source, and a few countries have focuses that hand over meaningful chunks of points directly.

On the spending side, projects draw from their field's pool, and costs range from a single point for cheap early projects like the flamethrower tank up to three or more for the big prestige builds like the land cruiser. This is where the banking habit pays off: if your land facility is idle and the land cruiser is on your wishlist, letting points accumulate beats spending them on filler projects you did not want. Modders can register custom specializations, but the four vanilla fields are the ones the commands accept: specialization_land, specialization_air, specialization_naval, and specialization_nuclear.

The console shortcut is sp_breakthrough. Run it with just a number and it adds points across all facilities; add a specialization and it targets that field, as in sp_br 20 specialization_land. Spelling matters — the command expects the full specialization_ prefix, and a typo fails silently. For sandbox work, a large lump sum removes the entire gate in one line. For anything resembling a real game, add points in small amounts so you still feel the tradeoffs the system is designed around.

Scientists and Facilities

Scientists are the easiest gate to cheat honestly, because the commands give you strictly better scientists than the game normally allows. sp_add_mastermind drops a level-five scientist with every specialization into your pool — the kind of hire that would take a real campaign years to grow. sp_add_scientist is the configurable version, accepting an optional level and specialization, which is handy when you want a specific field covered without the mastermind's overkill. If you already have a scientist selected, sp_set_selected_scientist_level adjusts them in place, and sp_add_selected_scientist_trait bolts on any trait by name, such as scientist_trait_brilliant_theorist.

One quirk causes most of the confusion with that last command: the facility view with the scientist assigned must be open on your screen when you run it. Close the window and the command does nothing, with no error to tell you why. Open the facility panel, click your scientist, then type.

Even with console scientists, the stacking rules still apply, and they are worth respecting in a sandbox too, because they teach you the real-game instinct. The first scientist in a facility works at full efficiency, the second at half, the third at a quarter. Four masterminds in one building are not four times the output — they are under twice. Spread your hired geniuses across facility types instead, one per building, and every one of them earns their keep.

Facilities are the one thing no command will simply hand you. There is no add-facility cheat. The workaround is instant construction: toggle ic, queue the facility, and it completes the next day. Then toggle ic off, and this part matters more than it sounds. Instant construction is a global toggle, not a player-only buff — leave it on and the AI starts building instantly as well, and within a few in-game months the entire world is unrecognizable. Every toggle command in this game works that way, from ic through the diplomacy cheats: the AI will exploit anything you leave running. Cheat like you are borrowing the tool, not owning it.

When you do build facilities, the placement rules are the same with or without cheats: one per state, sufficient supply in the region, a coastal tile for naval engineering, and position in depth rather than on a frontier. A facility that changes hands hands your progress to the enemy. If you are short on political power for legitimate scientist recruitment, pp fixes that at a thousand per keystroke, though at that point sp_add_mastermind is free and better.

Three Sandbox Workflows

Knowing the commands is half of it; knowing the sequences is what actually saves your evening. These three workflows cover nearly every reason to cheat on special projects, and each one starts the same way: make a save you are willing to throw away. Cheats write themselves into the save file, so sandbox work always happens on a copy.

Workflow one: test a project before you commit to it. This is the highest-value use of the entire system. Special-project rewards often rewrite a division's or a fleet's math — flame tank support companies, for instance, stack with engineer bonuses to the point where terrain penalties nearly stop existing — and you want to know that before spending a real campaign's breakthrough points on it. Make your throwaway save, run sp_unlock_all, start the project you are curious about, hit sp_instant, then build the unit it unlocks and put it through actual combat. Design the division with xp if you need to. When the test is done, reload the clean save and play the real game with knowledge instead of hope.

Workflow two: the superweapon afternoon. Sometimes you do not want to test anything — you want to see the Dora shell a coastline, or answer the question what would have happened if Germany got nuked instead of Japan. Staff a physics facility with sp_add_mastermind, mint points with sp_br 999 specialization_nuclear, run sp_available so no prerequisite tech gets in the way, start the project, and either let sp_fast carry it through its phases for the spectacle or end it immediately with sp_instant. The nukes command can top off your stockpile if the project route feels too slow for the apocalypse you had planned. You are the dungeon master now; the only wrong move is leaving a toggle on behind you.

Workflow three: the grand tour. New to the system and unsure what is worth your time? On a fresh throwaway game, run sp_research_all and walk the results. Every project the game contains just completed, scientists included — the command even creates one for you if your nation had none. Open the equipment designer, browse the new support companies, check which buildings appeared. Twenty minutes of touring tells you more than any tier list, because you see the actual unlocks in your own UI. Then start a real campaign and pick your two or three projects with intent.

Do not confuse sp_research_all with research all. The first completes special projects only. The second unlocks every regular technology in the game, including all doctrines at once, and the doctrines stack — divisions end up with organization values so absurd that combat stops meaning anything. research all is a fun button for five minutes and a broken game afterward. For surgical regular-tech work, research_on_icon_click lets you grant yourself one tech per click, prerequisites ignored, without nuking the balance.

One more tool for the testers: sp_prototype_reward triggers a specified prototype reward mid-project, so you can sample a project's payoff without sitting through the phase that normally grants it. If a project's reward is a choice between design directions, this is how you try both branches in the same evening.

Which Projects Are Worth Unlocking First

Cheating on special projects raises a question the game politely avoids: worth unlocking for what? There are no mandatory projects. You can win a World War without ever touching the system, and plenty of strong campaigns do. The value of a project is a function of how early its reward lands and how many of your divisions or ships benefit from it — which produces a facility priority order that holds up across patches: land first, then naval, then air, and physics last.

Land projects pay for themselves almost immediately. Two of them are worth completing the moment you can afford a land facility, in virtually any country and any game. The flamethrower tank unlocks the flame tank support companies, with the medium flame tank the standout; stacked with military engineering vehicles and engineer companies, the terrain-modifier penalties that shaped a century of Hearts of Iron tactics nearly cease to exist. Military engineering vehicles is the second always-worth-it pick, opening the assault engineer company plus the research lines for armored versions of engineer, maintenance, and signal companies. A strong third pick is the super heavy howitzer, which unlocks a support artillery company that stacks with regular support artillery and support rockets in the same division, piling soft attack without spending any extra combat width. Its one flaw is a four-kilometer-per-hour maximum speed that drags on fast divisions — a flaw its self-propelled follow-up project exists to fix.

Naval projects are about strangling, not fighting. The defining naval strategy of the system is the low-visibility submarine ladder: start with the cruiser submarine, add anechoic tiles, upgrade to the fleet submarine around 1939 while keeping the same hull, and finish with air-independent propulsion, whose top tier cuts visibility so far that submarines become effectively undetectable. Such a boat is mediocre at winning fleet battles and contributes little to naval dominance for invasions. It does something better: it deletes convoys. Kill enough convoys and the enemy runs out of fuel, traded resources, and overseas supply, and the collapse cascades into their navy, their air force, and their factory output. You do not beat their fleet; you starve everything the fleet protects. Alongside the submarine path, the support ships project is outstanding value — cheap repair and support vessels that cut attrition, soften critical hits, and extend fleet range and organization — and the proximity fuse is a passive, maintenance-free buff whose rewards reach both your ships' anti-air and your artillery companies on land. Radar is the situational star: detection, intel on enemy divisions, and a ship radar module, with value that scales with how concentrated your fighting is. As the Axis, a radar network across northern France turns the channel war against the UK noticeably in your favor.

Air projects are narrow by design. The helicopter is the safe pick, unlocking helicopter brigades and upgraded helicopter versions of recon, field hospital, and logistics companies — good if it comes naturally, not worth forcing. Jet engines trade speed for range, and range is the single most important air stat, which is why the only meta jet design in competitive play is a heavy fighter that can absorb the penalty; jets also add chromium to their cost, and chromium demand escalates fast on small airframes. Anything past the basic jet path eats four to seven breakthrough points across the axial and supersonic chain for gains that arrive too late to matter.

Physics is where projects go to be expensive. It is the priciest facility, the last to matter, and the weakest return in the system. Its one genuinely clever pick is the commercial nuclear reactor, which is less a nuclear project than a way to build dams wherever you want them: its regional modifiers mirror a dam's, granting a state more factory capacity, lower energy consumption, better resource output, and faster construction. Everything else in physics is a prestige purchase. Nukes are fun and fission bombs are the version you will actually drop — half the fallout of thermonuclears, and the United States can rush one from day one — but outside niche cases the resources belong elsewhere.

The traps are worth naming because the console makes them tempting. The land cruiser has stats for days and requires a dead-end super heavy tank line, late-war modules, and a train-supply bill that wrecks logistics, which is why competitive players rate it as a meme. The mothership aircraft needs a useless large airframe and loses on stats-per-cost to regular planes until techs that arrive around 1945. Rockets of every type are expensive, eat research speed, and pay off weakly. The ice carrier carries more planes per production cost than anything else afloat and is still usually wrong, because its speed forces you to micro it away from your main fleet. When you can have any project instantly, the discipline is choosing the boring one that helps every division over the spectacular one that helps none.

Facility	Priority	First project to run	Why it ranks here
Land	First, always	Flamethrower Tank, then Military Engineering Vehicles	Cheap, early, and the rewards plug into nearly every division you field.
Naval	Second for naval powers	Cruiser Submarine into Anechoic Tiles; Support Ships for surface fleets	Convoy strangulation wins wars quietly; support ships buff every task force you own.
Air	Situational	Radar where fighting is concentrated; Helicopter if it comes naturally	Rewards are strong but narrow, and the jet path punishes everything except heavy fighters.
Physics	Last	Commercial Nuclear Reactor, if anything	Most expensive facility, latest to matter, weakest return. A victory-lap budget, not a plan.

When a Command Does Nothing

Special-project commands fail silently more often than the rest of the console, and every common cause has a specific fix. Work this list before assuming a command is broken.

• You are in an Ironman game. The console does not exist in Ironman, full stop. No command, no achievements — the two are mutually exclusive by design. Start a normal game if you want to cheat.
• No project is actually in progress. sp_instant completes the current project, and if you have not started one, there is nothing to complete. Start a project first, or run sp_unlock_all or sp_available to clear the prerequisites that were blocking you from starting it.
• The project needs a DLC you do not own. Facilities themselves are not expansion-gated, but many individual projects require their related DLC. No console command conjures content your game does not have. If a project simply refuses to appear with sp_unlock_all active, check your DLC library before you check anything else.
• The facility GUI was closed. sp_add_selected_scientist_trait requires the facility view with the scientist assigned to be open on screen. Open it, select the scientist, then run the command.
• The specialization was misspelled. The fields are specialization_land, specialization_air, specialization_naval, and specialization_nuclear, full prefix included. A wrong string fails without complaint.
• You expected the command to care about resources. Missing strategic resources slow legitimate research but do not block it, and the autocomplete commands ignore the question entirely. That is exactly why sp_instant timings tell you nothing about how long a project would take in a real game.
• You left a toggle running. ic, the no-casus-belli toggle, the accept-all-diplomacy toggle — every one of them applies to the AI too. If your sandbox world has gone inexplicably chaotic, a toggle you forgot about is the usual suspect. Turn them off the moment you are done.
• Your cleanup was incomplete. If you used deleteallunits to reset the sandbox, note that it removes land and naval units but not air wings. Unexpected planes in a "clean" game are not a mystery.

And when none of that fits, stop guessing and ask the game. Type the command's prefix and press Tab to confirm it exists in your build, run help on it to see the exact arguments your version accepts, and use helplog to dump the complete command list to the log file. A command that does nothing is almost always a command that was renamed, moved behind a DLC, or aimed at the wrong stage of the pipeline — and the game itself will tell you which.

FAQ

Next Reads

• HoI4 Console Commands and Cheats — the full command reference, from diplomacy toggles to map painting, for everything beyond special projects.
• HoI4 Country Tags Guide — the tag list that makes tag and tdebug workflows painless.
• HoI4 Division Templates — what to actually build once flame tanks and engineer vehicles are unlocked.
• HoI4 Supply Guide — facility placement lives and dies by supply, and so does every offensive those facilities make possible.
• HoI4 Air Superiority and CAS Guide — the context for radar, jets, and why range beats speed in the air.
• HoI4 Germany First Campaign Guide — Germany starts with facilities already on the map, making it the natural country to learn the system in earnest.
• HoI4 Beginner Guide — the full first-campaign foundation, if special projects found you before the basics did.