Games like Hearts of Iron 4 can be very hard for newer players who don’t know anything about the game’s mechanics. This is why cheats can be very popular for the first few hundred hours of gameplay.
Most cheats in HOI4 involve Country Tags, which are special 3 letter words that are used to change things about various countries. Though most Country Tags are relatively easy to figure out without help since they might be the first three letters of a country’s name, some are really bizarre.
Recommended Read: Which DLC Is the Best in HOI4?
For example, the Country Tag for Peru is PRU because PER is already taken by Iran from Persia. However, there is no way you would guess that without some help.
To see Country Tags in Hearts of Iron 4, you just need to use the debug cheat to start seeing hidden things inside the game and hover over the flag of a country while in the diplomacy menu.
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How to See Country Tags in HOI4 using Cheats
The best way to see Country Tags in HOI4 is by doing this:
- Press “~” on your keyboard to open the command console. You can’t do this in Ironman Mode.
- Type in “debug” and press Enter.
- Close the command console by pressing “~” again.
- Right-click on the country you want to see the tag of to open the Diplomacy menu.
- Hover over their flag in the upper right corner, and you will see their Country Tag where “current tag:” is written.
This method is the most efficient way to see the Country Tags in HOI4 since you can easily check them for any country while in-game. Otherwise, you will have to look through game files to find these tags.
The debug command is also very useful since you can now see Province and State IDs, which are also very useful for most cheats that you might want to use.
However, the debug cheat adds a lot of Decisions that can overwhelm you and a lot of information on the screen that is confusing.
You can easily remove all the extra information on the screen by using the debug cheat again, which disables it.
How to See Country Tags Looking Through the Game Files
The other way you can find and see the Country Tags is to look through the country_tags folder in the game’s directory.
The usual game directory for HOI4 is “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Hearts of Iron IV” if you installed it using Steam in the default location.
You can find the country_tags folder inside the common folder, right in the main directory.
If you open the 00_countries file using Notepad, you can see the Country Tags for all of the countries in HOI4.
That’s everything you need to know about how to see Country Tags in Hearts of Iron 4!
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